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APPEARANCES 



Books by the Same Author 

From King to King 

The Greek View of Life 

Justice and Liberty 

Letters from a Chinese Official 

A Modern Symposium 

Religion: A Criticism and a 
Forecast 



APPEARANCES 



Notes of Travel East and West 



i<rin\v 



BY 



Gf LOWES DICKINSON 



r 




GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
1914 



.Us 



Copyright, 1914, by 
G. Lowes Dickinson 

All rights reserved, including that of 

translation into foreign languages, 

including the Scandinavian 



NOV -2 19/4 

©GI.A388199 



PREFACE 

The articles included in this book have already appeared, 
those from the East in the Manchester Guardian, those 
from America in the English Review. In reprinting them, 
I have chosen a title which may serve also as an apology. 
What I offer is not Reality, but appearances to me. From 
such appearances, perhaps, in time, Reality may be con- 
structed. I claim only to make my contribution. I do so 
because the new contact between East and West is perhaps 
the most important fact of our age; and the problems of 
action and thought which it creates can only be solved 
as each civilisation tries to understand the others, and, by 
so doing, better to understand itself. These articles rep- 
resent at any rate a good will to understand; and they 
may, I hope, for that reason throw one gleam of light on 
the darkness. 

For the opportunity of travelling in the East I am 
indebted to the munificence of Mr. Albert Kahn of Paris, 
who has founded what are known in this country as the 
Albert Kahn Travelling Fellowships. 1 The existence of 
this endowment is perhaps not as widely known as it should 

1 These Fellowships, each of the value of £660, were established to enable the 
persons appointed to them to travel round the world. The Trust is administered 
at the University of London, and full information regarding it can be obtained 
from the Principal, Sir Henry Miers, F. R. S., who is Honorary Secretary to the 
Trustees. 

[v] 



PREFACE 

be. And if this volume should be the occasion of leading 
others to take advantage of the founder's generosity it 
will not have been written in vain. 

I have hesitated long before deciding to republish the 
letters on America. They were written in 1909, before 
the election of President Wilson, and all that led up to 
and is implied in that event. It was not, however, the 
fact that, so far, they are out of date, that caused me to 
hesitate. For they deal only incidentally with current pol- 
itics, and whatever value they may have is as a com- 
mentary on phases of American civilisation which are of 
more than transitory significance. Much has happened 
in the United States during the last few years which is of 
great interest and importance. The conflict between 
democracy and plutocracy has become more conscious and 
more acute; there have been important developments in 
the labour movements; and capital has been so "harassed" 
by legislation that it may, for the moment, seem odd to 
capitalists to find America called "the paradise of Plutoc- 
racy." No doubt the American public has awakened to 
its situation since 1909. But such awakenings take a long 
time to transform the character of a civilisation; and all 
that has occurred serves only to confirm the contention in 
the text that in the new world the same situation is arising 
that confronts the old one. 

What made me hesitate was something more important 
than the date at which the letters were written. There 
is in them a note of exasperation which I would have 

[vi] 



PREFACE 

wished to remove if I could. But I could not, without a 
complete rewriting, by which, even if it were possible 
to me, more would have been lost than gained. It is 
this note of exasperation which has induced me hitherto 
to keep the letters back, in spite of requests to the con- 
trary from American friends and publishers. But the 
opportunity of adding them as a pendant to letters from 
the East, where they fall naturally into their place as a 
complement and a contrast, has finally overcome my 
scruples; the more so, as much that is said of America is 
as typical of all the West, as it is foreign to all the East. 
That this western civilisation, against which I have so 
much to say, is nevertheless the civilisation in which I 
would choose to live, in which I believe, and about which 
all my hopes centre, I have endeavoured to make clear 
in the concluding essay. And my readers, I hope, if any 
of them persevere to the end, will feel that they have been 
listening, after all, to the voice of a friend, even if the friend 
be of that disagreeable kind called "candid." 
Cambridge, 1914. 



[vii] 



CONTENTS 

PART I. 
INDIA 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. In the Red Sea 3 

II. Ajanta 7 

III. Ulster in India 11 

IV. Anglo-India 15 

V. A Mystery Play 18 

VI. An Indian Saint 22 

VII. A Village in Bengal 26 

VIII. Sri Ramakrishna . 30 

IX. The Monstrous Regimen of Women ... 36 

X. The Buddha at Burupudur 40 

XI. A Malay Theatre ........ 44 

PART II. 
CHINA 

I. First Impressions of China ..... 51 

II. Nanking . 55 

III. In the Yangtse Gorges 60 

IV. Pekin 66 

V. The Englishman Abroad 72 

VI. China in Transition 79 

VII. A Sacred Mountain 87 

[ixl 



CONTENTS 

PART III. 
JAPAN 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. First Impressions of Japan 97 

II. A "No" Dance 102 

III. NlKKO IO7 

IV. Divine Right in Japan 112 1 

V. Fuji 119 

VI. Japan and America 126 i 

VII. Home 132 * 

PART IV. 
AMERICA , 

I. The " Divine Average" 139 

II. A Continent of Pioneers . 143 I 

III. Niagara 150 

IV. "The Modern Pulpit" 154 

V. In the Rockies . 161 

VI. In the Adirondacks ........ 167 

VII. The Religion of Business 173 

VIII. Red-Bloods and "Mollycoddles" . . . 180 

IX. Advertisement 187 

X. Culture ..... 192 

XI. Ant^us 198 v 

Concluding Essay . . 205 



lx] 



PART I 
INDIA 



I 

IN THE RED SEA 

"But why do you do it? " said the Frenchman. From 
the saloon above came a sound of singing, and I recognised 
a well-known hymn. The sun was blazing on a foam- 
flecked sea; a range of islands lifted red rocks into the 
glare; the wind blew fresh; and, from above — 



1 Nothing in my hand I bring, 
Simply to Thy cross I cling." 



Male voices were singing; voices whose owners, beyond 
a doubt, had no idea of clinging to anything. Female 
voices, too, of dingers, perhaps, but hardly to a cross. 
"Why do you do it? " — I began to explain. "For the 
same reason that we play deck-quoits and shuffle-board; 
for the same reason that we dress for dinner. It's the 
system." " The system? " " Yes. What I call Anglican- 
ism. It's a form of idealism. It consists in doing the 
proper thing." "But why should the proper thing be 
done?" "That question ought not to be asked. Angli- 
canism is an idealistic creed. It is anti-utilitarian and 
anti-rational. It does not ask questions; it has faith. 



APPEARANCES 

The proper thing is the proper thing, and because it is 
the proper thing it is done. ,, "At least," he said, "you 
do not pretend that this is religion?" "No. It has 
nothing to do with religion. But neither is it, as you, too, 
simply suppose, hypocrisy. Hypocrisy implies that you 
know what religion is, and counterfeit it. But these 
people do not know, and they are not counterfeiting. 
When they go to church they are not thinking of religion. 
They are thinking of the social system. The officers and 
civilians singing up there first learned to sing in the village 
church. They walked to the church from the great house; 
the great house stood in its park; the park was enclosed 
by the estate; and the estate was surrounded by other 
estates. The service in the village church stood for all 
that. And the service in the saloon stands for it still. 
At bottom, what that hymn means is not that these men 
are Christians, but that they are carrying England to 
India, to Burma, to China." "It is a funny thing," the 
Frenchman mused, "to carry to 300 million Hindus and 
Mahometans, and 400 million Confucians, Buddhists, 
and devil-worshippers. What do they do with it when 
they get there?" "They plant it down in little oases 
all over the country, and live in it. It is the shell that 
protects them in those oceans of impropriety. And from 
that shell they govern the world." "But how can they 
govern what they can't even see?" "They govern all 
the better. If once they could see, they would be lost. 
Doubt would enter in. And it is the virtue of the English- 

[4] 



IN THE RED SEA 

man that he never doubts. That is what the system 
does for him." 

At this moment a voice was borne down the breeze. 
It was that of my travelling companion, and it appeared, 
as he approached, that he was discoursing to the captain 
on the merits of Dostoievsky's novels. He is no respecter 
of persons; he imposes his own conversation; and the 
captain, though obviously puzzled, was polite. "Rus- 
sians may be like that," he was remarking as he passed, 
"but Englishmen aren't." "No," said my friend, "but 
don't you wish they were? " "I do not" said the captain 
with conviction. I looked at the Frenchman. "There," 
I said, " behold the system." " But your friend? " "Ah, 
but he, like myself, is a pariah. Have you not observed? 
They are quite polite. They have even a kind of respect 
— such as our public school boys have — for any one 
who is queer, if only he is queer enough. But we don't 
* belong,' and they know it. We are outside the system. 
At bottom we are dangerous, like foreigners. And they 
don't quite approve of our being let loose in India." 
"Besides, you talk to the Indians." "Yes, we talk to 
the Indians." "And that is contrary to the system?" 
"Yes, on board the boat; it's all very well while you're 
still in England." "A strange system — to perpetuate 
between rulers and ruled an impassable gulf!" "Yes. 
But, as Mr. Podsnap remarked, 'so it is.'" 

We had penetrated to the bows of the ship and hung 
looking over. Suddenly, just under the surf, there was 

[5] 



APPEARANCES 

an emerald gleam; another; then a leap and a dive; a 
leap and a dive again. A pair of porpoises were playing 
round the bows with the ease, the spontaneity, the 
beauty of perfect and happy life. As we watched them 
the same mood grew in us till it forced expression. And 
"Oh," I said, "the ship's a prison!" "No," said the 
Frenchman, "it's the system." 



161 



n 

AJANTA 

A dusty road running through an avenue across the 
great plateau of the Deccan; scanty crops of maize and 
cotton; here and there low hills, their reddish soil sparsely 
clothed with trees; to the north, a receding line of moun- 
tains; elsewhere infinite space and blazing light. Our 
"tonga," its pair of wheels and its white awning rolling 
and jolting behind two good horses, passes long lines of 
bullock-carts. Indians, walking beside them with their 
inimitable gait, make exquisite gestures of abjection to 
the clumsy white Sahibs huddled uncomfortably on the 
back seat. Their robes of vivid colour, always harmoni- 
ously blent, leave bare the slender brown legs and often 
the breast and back. Children stark naked ride on their 
mothers' hips or their fathers' shoulders. Now and again 
the oxen are unyoked at a dribble of water, and a party 
rests and eats in the shade. Otherwise it is one long 
march with bare feet over the burning soil. 

We are approaching a market. The mud walls of a 
village appear. And outside, by a stream shrunk now 
into muddy pools, shimmers and wimmers a many- 
coloured crowd, buzzing among their wagons and 

[7] 



APPEARANCES 

awnings and improvised stalls. We ford the shallow 
stream, where women are washing clothes, cleaning their 
teeth, and drinking from the same water, and pass among 
the bags of corn, the sugar-cane, and sweetmeats, saluted 
gravely but unsolicited. 

Then on again for hours, the road now solitary, till as 
day closes we reach Fardapur. A cluster of mud-walled 
compounds and beehive huts lies about a fortified en- 
closure, where the children sprawl and scream, and a 
Brahmin intones to silent auditors. Outside they are 
drawing water from the puddles of the stream. And 
gradually over the low hills and the stretches of yellow 
grass the after-glow spreads a transfiguring light. Out 
of a rosy flush the evening star begins to shine; the 
crickets cry; a fresh breeze blows; and another pitiless 
day drops into oblivion. 

Next day, at dawn, we walk the four miles to the famous 
caves, guided by a boy who wears the Nizam's livery, and 
explains to us, in a language we do not know, but with 
perfect lucidity, that it is to him, and no one else, that 
backsheesh is due. He sings snatches of music as old 
and strange as the hills; picks us balls of cotton, and 
prickly pear; and once stops to point to the fresh tracks 
of a panther. We are in the winding gorge of a water- 
course; and presently, at a turn, in a semicircle facing 
south, we see in the cliff the long line of caves. As we 
enter the first an intolerable odour meets us, and a flight 
of bats explains the cause. Gradually our eyes accustom 

[8] 



AJANTA 

themselves to the light, and we become conscious of a 
square hall, the flat roof resting on squat pillars elaborately 
carved, fragments of painting on the walls and ceiling, 
narrow slits opening into dark cells, and opposite the 
entrance, set back in a shrine, a colossal Buddha, the 
light falling full on the solemn face, the upturned feet, 
the expository hands. This is a monastery, and most of 
the caves are on the same plan; but one or two are long 
halls, presumably for worship, with barrel-vaulted roofs, 
and at the end a great solid globe on a pedestal. 

Of the art of these caves I will not speak. What little 
can be seen of the painting — and only ill-lighted frag- 
ments remain — is full of tenderness, refinement, and 
grace; no touch of drama; no hint of passion. The 
sculpture, stripped of its stucco surface, is rude but often 
impressive. But what impresses most is not the art but 
the religion of the place. In this terrible country, where 
the great forces of nature, drought and famine and 
pestilence, the intolerable sun, the intolerable rain, and 
the exuberance of life and death, have made of mankind a 
mere passive horde cowering before inscrutable Powers 
— here, more than anywhere, men were bound under a 
yoke of observance and ritual to the gods they had 
fashioned and the priest who interpreted their will. Then 
came the Deliverer to set them free not for but from life, 
teaching them how to escape from that worst of all evils, 
rebirth again and again into a world of infinite suffering, 
unguided by any reason to any good end. " There is no 

[9] 



APPEARANCES 

god," said this strange master, "there is no soul; but 
there is life after death, life here in this hell, unless you 
will learn to deliver yourselves by annihilating desire." 
They listened; they built monasteries; they meditated; 
and now and again, here, perhaps, in these caves, one or 
other attained enlightenment. But the cloud of Hindu- 
ism, lifted for a moment, rolled back heavier than ever. 
The older gods were seated too firmly on their thrones. 
Shiva — creator, preserver, destroyer — expelled the Bud- 
dha. And that passive figure, sublime in its power of mind, 
sits for ever alone in the land of his birth, exiled from 
light, in a cloud of clinging bats. 

But outside proceeds the great pageant of day and 
night, and the patient, beautiful people labour without 
hope, while universal nature, symbolised by Shiva's foot, 
presses heavily on their heads and forbids them the 
stature of man. Only the white man here, bustling, 
ungainly, aggressive, retains his freedom and acts rather 
than suffers. One understands at last the full meaning 
of the word "environment." Because of this sun, be- 
cause of this soil, because of their vast numbers, these 
people are passive, religious, fatalistic. Because of our 
cold and rain in the north, our fresh springs and summers, 
we are men of action, of science, of no reflection. The 
seed is the same, but according to the soil it brings forth 
differently. Here the patience, the beauty, the abjection 
before the Devilish-Divine ; there the defiance, the cult of the 
proud self. And these things have met. To what result? 

[10] 



Ill 

ULSTER IN INDIA 

"Are you a Home Ruler?" "Yes. Are you?" In- 
stantly a torrent of protest. He was a Mahometan, 
eminent in law and politics; clever, fluent, forensic, with 
a passion for hearing himself talk, and addressing one 
always as if one were a public meeting. He approached 
his face close to mine, gradually backing me into the wall. 
And I realised the full meaning of Carlyle's dictum "to 
be a mere passive bucket to be pumped into can be agree- 
able to no human being." 

It was not, naturally, the Irish question for its own 
sake that interested him. But he took it as a type of 
the Indian question. Here, too, he maintained, there 
is an Ulster, the Mahometan community. Here, too, 
there are Nationalists, the Hindus. Here, too, a "loyal" 
minority, protected by a beneficent and impartial Im- 
perial Government. Here, too, a majority of "rebels" 
bent on throwing off that Government in order that they 
may oppress the minority. Here, too, an ideal of in- 
dependence hypocritically masked under the phrase 
"self-government." "It is a law of political science that 
where there are two minorities they should stand together 

in] 



APPEARANCES 

against the majority. The Hindus want to get rid of 
you, as they want to get rid of us. And for that reason 
alone, if there were not a thousand others" — there were, 
he hinted, but, rhetorically, he "passed them over in 
silence" — "for that reason alone I am loyal to the British 
raj." It had never occurred to me to doubt it. But I 
questioned, when I got a moment's breathing space, 
whether really the Hindu community deliberately nour- 
ished this dark conspiracy. He had no doubt, so far as 
the leaders were concerned; and he mistrusted the 
"moderates" more than the extremists, because they were 
cleverer. He "multiplied examples" — it was his phrase. 
The movement for primary education, for example. It 
had nothing to do with education. It was a plot to 
teach the masses Hindi, in order that they might be 
swept into the anti-British, anti-Mahometan current. 
As to minor matters, no Hindu had ever voted for a 
Mahometan, no Hindu barrister ever sent a client to a 
Mahometan colleague. Whereas in all these matters, 
one was led to infer, Mahometans were conciliation and 
tolerance itself. I knew that the speaker himself had 
secured the election of Mahometans to all the seats in the 
Council. But I refrained from referring to the matter. 
Then there was caste. A Hindu will not eat with a 
Mahometan, and this was taken as a personal insult. 
I suggested that the English were equally boycotted; 
but that we regarded the boycott as a religious obligation, 
not as a social stigma. But, like the Irish Ulstermen, he 

[12] 



ULSTER IN INDIA 

was not there to listen to argument. He rolled on like a 
river. None of us could escape. He detected the first 
signs of straying, and beckoned us back to the flock. " Mr. 
Audubon, this is important." "Mr. Coryat, you must 
listen to this." Coryat, at last, grew restive, and re- 
marked rather tartly that no doubt there was friction 
between the two communities, but that the worst way 
to deal with it was by recrimination. He agreed; with 
tears in his eyes he agreed. There was nothing he had 
not done, no advance he had not made, to endeavour to 
bridge the gulf. All in vain! Never were such obstinate 
fellows as these Hindus. And he proceeded once more 
to " multiply examples." As we said " Good-bye" in 
the small hours of the morning he pressed into our hands 
copies of his speeches and addresses. And we left him 
perorating on the steps of the hotel. 

A painfully acquired mistrust of generalisation pre- 
vents me from saying that this is the Mahometan point 
of view. Indeed, I have reason to know that it is not. 
But it is a Mahometan point of view in one province. 
And it was endorsed, more soberly, by less rhetorical 
members of the community. Some twenty-five years 
ago, they say, Mahometans woke to the fact that they 
were dropping behind in the race for influence and power. 
They started a campaign of education and organisation. 
At every point they found themselves thwarted; and 
always, behind the obstacle, lurked a Hindu. Lord 
Morley's reform of the Councils, intended to unite all 

fi3l 



APPEARANCES 

sections, had had the opposite effect. Nothing but the 
separate electorates had saved Mahometans from political 
extinction. And precisely because they desired that 
extinction Hindus desired mixed electorates. The elec- 
tions to the Councils have exasperated the antagonism 
between the two communities. And an enemy might 
accuse the Government of being actuated, in that reform, 
by the Machiavellian maxim " Divide et impera." 

What the Hindus have to say to all this I have not 
had an opportunity of learning. But they, too, I con- 
ceive, can "multiply examples" for their side. To a 
philosophic observer two reflections suggest themselves. 
One, that representative government can only work 
when there is real give and take between the contending 
parties. The other, that to most men, and most nations, 
religion means nothing more than antagonism to some 
other religion. Witness Ulster in Ireland, and witness, 
equally, Ulster in India. 



[14] 



IV 

ANGLO -INDIA 

From the gallery of the high hall we look down to the 
assembled society of the cantonment. The scene is com- 
monplace enough; twaddle and tea, after tennis; " frivol- 
ling' ' — it is their word; women too empty-headed and men 
too tired to do anything else. This mill-round of work and 
exercise is maintained like a religion. The gymkhana rep- 
resents the " compulsory games" of a public school. It 
is part of the "white man's burden." He plays, as he 
works, with a sense of responsibility. He is bored, but 
boredom is a duty, and there's nothing else to do. 

The scene is commonplace. Yes! But this afternoon 
a band is playing. The music suits the occasion. It is 
soft, melodious, sentimental. It provokes a vague sen- 
sibility, and makes no appeal to the imagination. At 
least it should not, from its quality. But the power of 
music is incalculable. It has an essence independent 
of its forms. And by virtue of that essence its poorest 
manifestations can sink a shaft into the springs of life. 
So as I listen languidly the scene before me detaches 
itself from actuality and floats away on the stream of 
art. It becomes a symbol; and around and beyond it, 

[is! 



APPEARANCES 

in some ideal space, other symbols arise and begin to 
move. I see the East as an infinite procession. Huge 
Bactrian camels balance their bobbing heads as they 
pad deliberately over the burning dust. Laden asses, 
cattle, and sheep, and goats move on in troops. Black- 
bearded men, men with beard and hair dyed red, women 
pregnant or carrying babies on their hips, youths like 
the Indian Bacchus with long curling hair, children of all 
ages, old men magnificent and fierce, all the generations 
of Asia pass and pass on, seen like a frieze against a rock 
background, blazing with colour, rhythmical and fluent, 
marching menacingly down out of infinite space on to 
this little oasis of Englishmen. Then, suddenly, they 
are an ocean; and the Anglo-Indian world floats upon 
it like an Atlantic liner. It has its gymnasium, its 
swimming-bath, its card-rooms, its concert-room. It 
has its first and second class and steerage well marked 
off. It dresses for dinner every night; it has an Anglican 
service on Sunday; it flirts mildly; it is bored; but 
above all it is safe. It has water-tight compartments. 
It is "unsinkable." The band is playing; and when the 
crash comes it will not stop. No; it will play this music, 
this, which is in my ears. Is it Gounod's "Faust" or an 
Anglican hymn? No matter! It is the same thing, 
sentimental, and not imaginative. And sentimentally, 
not imaginatively, the Englishman will die. He will not 
face the event, but he will stand up to it. He will realise 
nothing, but he will shrink from nothing. Of all the stories 

[16] 



ANGLO -INDIA 

about the loss of the Titanic the best and most characteris- 
tic is that of the group of men who sat conversing in the 
second-class smoking-room, till one of them said, "Now 
she's going down. Let's go and sit in the first-class saloon." 
And they did. How touching ! How sublime ! How Eng- 
lish ! The Titanic sinks. With a roar the machinery crashes 
from stem to bow. Dust on the water, cries on the water, 
then vacuity and silence. The East has swept over this 
colony of the West. And still its generations pass on, 
rhythmically swinging; slaves of Nature, not, as in the 
West, rebels against her; cyclical as her seasons and her 
stars; infinite as her storms of dust; identical as the leaves of 
her trees; purposeless as her cyclones and her earthquakes. 
The music stops and I rub my eyes. Yes, it is only 
the club, only tea and twaddle! Or am I wrong? There 
is more in these men and women than appears. They 
stand for the West, for the energy of the world, for all, 
in this vast Nature, that is determinate and purposive, 
not passively repetitionary. And if they do not know it, 
if they never hear the strain that transposes them and 
their work into a tragic dream, if tennis is tennis to them, 
and a valse a valse, and an Indian a native, none the less 
they are what a poet would see them to be, an oasis in 
the desert, a liner on the ocean, ministers of the life within 
life that is the hope, the inspiration, and the meaning of 
the world. In my heart of hearts I apologise as I pro- 
long the banalities of parting, and almost vow never 
again to abuse Gounod's music. 

[17] 



A MYSTERY PLAY 

A few lamps set on the floor lit up the white roof. On 
either side the great hall was open to the night; and 
now and again a bird flew across, or a silent figure flitted 
from dark to dark. On a low platform sat the dancers, 
gorgeously robed. All were boys. The leader, a peacock- 
fan flashing in his head-dress, personated Krishna. Be- 
side him sat Rhada, his wife. The rest were the milk- 
maids of the legend. They sat like statues, and none of 
them moved at our entry. But the musicians, who were 
seated on the ground, rose and salaamed, and instantly 
began to play. There were five instruments — a minia- 
ture harmonium (terrible innovation), two viols, of flat, 
unresonant tone, a pair of cymbals, and a small drum. 
The ear, at first, detected little but discordant chaos, 
but by degrees a form became apparent — short phrases, 
of strong rhythm, in a different scale from ours, repeated 
again and again, and strung on a thread of loose impro- 
visation. Every now and again the musicians burst into 
song. Their voices were harsh and nasal, but their art 
was complicated and subtle. Clearly, this was not bar- 
barous music, it was only strange, and its interest in- 

[18J 



A MYSTERY PLAY 

creased, as the ear became accustomed to it. Suddenly, 
as though they could resist no longer, the dancers, who had 
not moved, leapt from the platform and began their 
dance. It was symbolical; Krishna was its centre, and 
the rest were wooing him. Desire and its frustration and 
fulfilment were the theme. Yet it was not sensual, or 
not merely so. The Hindus interpret in a religious spirit 
this legendary sport of Krishna with the milkmaids. It 
symbolises the soul's wooing of God. And so these boys 
interpreted it. Their passion, though it included the 
flesh, was not of the flesh. The mood was rapturous, but 
not abandoned; ecstatic, but not orgiastic. There were 
moments of a hushed suspense when hardly a muscle 
moved; only the arms undulated and the feet and hands 
vibrated. Then a break into swift whirling, on the toes 
or on the knees, into leaping and stamping, swift flight and 
pursuit. A pause again; a slow march; a rush with twin- 
kling feet; and always, on those young faces, even in the 
moment of most excitement, a look of solemn rapture, as 
though they were carried out of themselves into the di- 
vine. I have seen dancing more accomplished, more 
elaborate, more astonishing than this. But never any 
that seemed to me to fulfil so well the finest purposes of 
the art. The Russian ballet, in the retrospect, seems 
trivial by comparison. It was secular; but this was re- 
ligious. For the first time I seemed to catch a glimpse 
of what the tragic dance of the Greeks might have been 
like. The rhythms were not unlike those of Greek chor- 

[19] 



APPEARANCES 

uses, the motions corresponded strictly to the rhythms, and 
all was attuned to a high religious mood. In such dancing 
the flesh becomes spirit, the body a transparent emblem 
of the soul. 

After that the play, I confess, was a drop into bathos. 
We descended to speech, even to tedious burlesque. 
But the analogy was all the closer to mediaeval mysteries. 
In ages of Faith religion is not only sublime; it is intimate, 
humorous, domestic; it sits at the hearth and plays in the 
nursery. So it is in India where the age of Faith has never 
ceased. What was represented that night was an episode 
in the story of Krishna. The characters were the infant 
god, his mother, Jasodha, and an ancient Brahmin who 
has come from her own country to congratulate her on the 
birth of a child. He is a comic character — the sagging 
belly and the painted face of the pantomime. He answers 
Jasodha's inquiries after friends and relations at home. 
She offers him food. He professes to have no appetite, 
but, on being pressed, demands portentous measures of 
rice and flour. While she collects the material for his 
meal, he goes to bathe in the Jumna; and the whole ritual 
of his ablutions is elaborately travestied, even a crocodile 
being introduced in the person of one of the musicians, 
who rudely pulls him by the leg as he is rolling in imagi- 
nary water. His bathing finished, he retires and cooks his 
food. When it is ready he falls into prayer. But during 
his abstraction the infant Krishna crawls up and begins 
devouring the food. Returning to himself, the Brahmin, 

[20] 



A MYSTERY PLAY 

in a rage, runs off into the darkness of the hall. Jasodha 
pursues him and brings him back. And he begins once 
more to cook his food. This episode was repeated three 
times in all its details, and I confess I found it insufferably 
tedious. The third time Jasodha scolds the child and 
asks him why he does it. He replies — and here comes the 
pretty point of the play — that the Brahmin, in praying 
to God and offering him the food, unwittingly is praying 
to him and offering to him, and in eating the food he has 
but accepted the offering. The mother does not under- 
stand, but the Brahmin does, and prostrates himself 
before his Lord. 

This is crude enough art, but at any rate it is genuine. 
Like all primitive art, it is a representation of what is 
traditionally believed and popularly felt. The story is 
familiar to the audience and intimate to their lives. It 
represents details which they witness every day, and at 
the same time it has religious significance. Out of it might 
grow a great drama, as once in ancient Greece. And 
perhaps from no other origin can such a drama arise. 



[21] 



VI 

AN INDIAN SAINT 

It was at Benares that we met him. He led us through 
the maze of the bazaars, his purple robe guiding us like 
a star, and brought us out by the mosque of Aurungzebe. 
Thence a long flight of stairs plunged sheer to the Ganges, 
shining below in the afternoon sun. We descended; but, 
turning aside before we reached the shore, came to a tiny 
house perched on a terrace above the ghat. We took off 
our shoes in the anteroom and passed through a second 
chamber, with its river-side open to the air, and reached 
a tiny apartment, where he motioned us to a divan. We 
squatted and looked round. Some empty bottles were 
the only furniture. But on the wall hung the picture we 
had come to see. It was a symbolic tree, and perhaps as 
much like a tree as what it symbolised was like the universe. 
Embedded in its trunk and branches were coloured circles 
and signs, and from them grew leaves and flowers of various 
hues. Below was a garden lit by a rising sun, and a black 
river where birds and beasts pursued and devoured one 
another. At our request he took a pointer and began to 
explain. I am not sure that I well understood or well 
remember, but something of this kind was the gist of it. 

[22] 



AN INDIAN SAINT 

In the beginning was Parabrahma, existing in himself, a 
white circle at the root of the tree. Whence sprang, 
following the line of the trunk, the egg of the universe, 
pregnant with all potentialities. Thence came the energy 
of Brahma; and of this there were three aspects, the Good, 
the Evil, and the Neuter, symbolised by three triangles in 
a circle. Thence the trunk continued, but also thence 
emerged a branch to the right and one to the left. The 
branch to the right was Illusion and ended in God; the 
branch to the left was Ignorance and ended in the Soul. 
Thus the Soul contemplates Illusion under the form of her 
gods. Up the line of the trunk came next the Energy of 
Nature; then Pride; then Egotism and Individuality; 
whence branched to one side Mind, to the other the senses 
and the passions. Then followed the elements, fire, air, 
water, and earth; then the vegetable creation; then 
corn; and then, at the summit of the tree, the primitive 
Man and Woman, type of Humanity. The garden below 
was Eden, until the sun rose; but with light came discord 
and conflict, symbolised by the river and the beasts. 
Evil and conflict belong to the nature of the created world; 
and the purpose of religion is by contemplation to enable 
the Soul to break its bodies, and the whole creation to 
return again to Parabrahma, whence it sprung. 

Why did it spring? He did not know. For good 
or for evil? He could not say. What he knew he knew, 
and what he did not know he did not. " Some say there 
is no God and no Soul." He smiled. "Let them!" His 

[23] 



APPEARANCES 

certainty was complete. "Can the souls of men be rein- 
carnated as animals? " He shrugged his shoulders. "Who 
can say?" I tried to put in a plea for the life of action, 
but he was adamant; contemplation and contemplation 
alone can deliver us. "Our good men," I said, "desire 
to make the world better, rather than to save their own 
souls." "Our sages," he replied, "are sorry for the world, 
but they know they cannot help it." His religion, I 
urged, denied all sense to the process of history. "There 
may be process in matter," he replied, "but there is none 
in God." I protested that I loved individual souls, and 
did not want them absorbed in Parabrahma. He laughed 
his good cheery laugh, out of his black beard, but it was 
clear that he held me to be a child, imprisoned in the 
Ego. I felt like that, and I hugged my Ego; so presently 
he ministered to it with sweetmeats. He even ate with 
us, and smoked a cigarette. He was the most human of 
men; so human that I thought his religion could not be 
as inhuman as it sounded. But it was the religion of the 
East, not of the West. It refused all significance to the 
temporal world; it took no account of society and its 
needs; it sought to destroy, not to develop, the sense and 
the power of Individuality. It did not say, but it implied 
that creation was a mistake; and if it did not profess 
pessimism, pessimism was its logical outcome. I do not 
know whether it is the religion of a wise race; but I am 
sure it could never be that of a strong one. 
But I loved the saint, and felt that he was a brother. 

[24] 



AN INDIAN SAINT 

Next morning, as we drifted past the long line of ghats, 
watching the bright figures on the terraces and stairs, 
the brown bodies in the water, and the Brahmins squat- 
ting on the shore, we saw him among the bathers, and 
he called to us cheerily. We waved our hands and passed 
on, never to see him again. East had not met West, but 
at least they had shaken hands across the gulf. The gulf, 
however, was profound; for many and many incarnations 
will be needed before one soul at least can come even to 
wish to annihilate itself in the Universal. 



Us) 



VII 

A VILLAGE IN BENGAL 

At 6 A. m. we got out of the train at a station on the 
Ganges; and after many delays found ourselves drifting 
down the river in a houseboat. To lie on cushions, shel- 
tered from the sun, looking out on the moving shore, 
to the sound of the leisurely plash of oars, is elysium after 
a night in the train. We had seven hours of it, and I 
could have wished it were more. But towards sunset 
we reached our destination. At the wharf a crowd of 
servants were waiting to touch the feet of our hosts who 
had travelled with us. They accompanied us through a 
tangle of palms, bananas, mangoes, canes, past bamboo 
huts raised on platforms of hard, dry mud, to the central 
place where a great banyan stood in front of the temple. 
We took off our shoes and entered the enclosure, followed 
by half the village, silent, dignified, and deferential. Over 
ruined shrines of red brick, elaborately carved, clambered 
and twined the sacred peepul tree. And within a more 
modern building were housed images of Krishna and 
Rhada, and other symbols of what we call, too hastily, 
idolatry. Outside was a circular platform of brick where 
these dolls are washed in milk at the great festivals of the 

[26] 



A VILLAGE IN BENGAL 

year. We passed on, and watched the village weaver at 
his work, sitting on the ground with his feet in a pit work- 
ing the pedals of his loom; while outside, in the garden, a 
youth was running up and down setting up, thread by 
thread, the long strands of the warp. By the time we 
reached the house it was dusk. A lamp was brought 
into the porch. Musicians and singers squatted on the 
floor. Behind them a white-robed crowd faded into the 
night. And we listened to hymns composed by the village 
saint, who had lately passed away. 

First there was a prayer for forgiveness. "Lord, 
forgive us our sins. You must forgive, for you are called 
the merciful. And it's so easy for you ! And, if you don't, 
what becomes of your reputation?" Next, a call to the 
ferry. "Come and cross over with me. Krishna is the 
boat and Rhada the sail. No storms can wreck us. 
Come, cross over with me." Then a prayer for deliver- 
ance from the "well" of the world where we are impris- 
oned by those dread foes, the five senses of the mind. 
Then a rhapsody on God, invisible, incomprehensible. 
"He speaks, but He is not seen. He lives in the room 
with me, but I cannot find Him. He brings to market 
His moods, but the marketer never appears. Some call 
Him fire, some ether. But I ask His name in vain. I 
suppose I am such a fool that they will not tell it me." 
Then a strange, ironical address to Krishna. "Really, sir, 
your conduct is very odd! You flirt with the Gopis! 
You put Rhada in a sulk, and then ask to be forgiven! 

[27] 



APPEARANCES 

You say you are a god, and yet you pray to God! Really, 
sir, what are we to think? " Lastly, a mystic song, how 
Krishna has plunged into the ocean of Rhada; how he is 
there drifting, helpless and lost. Can we not save him? 
But no! It is because his love is not perfect and pure. 
And that is why he must be incarnated again and again 
in the avatars. 

Are these people idolaters, these dignified old men, 
these serious youths, these earnest, grave musicians? 
Look at their temple, and you say, "Yes." Xisten to 
their hymns, and you say, "No." Reformers want to 
educate them, and, perhaps, they are right. But if 
education is to mean the substitution of the gramophone 
and music-hall songs for this traditional art, these native 
hymns? I went to bed pondering, and was awakened at 
six by another chorus telling us it was time to get up. We 
did so, and visited the school, set up by my friend as an 
experiment; a mud floor, mud-lined walls, all scrupulously 
clean; and squatting round the four sides children of all 
ages, all reciting their lessons at once, and all the lessons 
different. They were learning to read and write their 
native language, and that, at least, seemed harmless 
enough. But parents complained that it unfitted them 
for the fields. "Our fathers did not do it" — that, said 
my impatient young host, is their reply to every attempt 
at reform. In his library were all the works of Nietzsche, 
Tolstoy, Wells, and Shaw, as well as all the technical jour- 
nals of scientific agriculture. He lectured them on the 

[28] 



A VILLAGE IN BENGAL 

chemical constituents of milk and the crossing of sugar- 
canes. They embraced his feet, sang their hymns, and 
did as their fathers had done. He has a hard task before 
him, but one far better worth attempting than the legal 
and political activities in which most young Zemindars 
indulge. And, as he said, here you see the fields and hear 
the birds, and here you can bathe in the Ganges. We 
did; and then breakfasted; and then set out in palanquins 
for the nearest railway station. The bearers sang a 
rhythmic chant as they bore us smoothly along through 
mustard and pulses, yellow and orange and mauve. The 
sun blazed hot; the bronzed figures streamed with sweat; 
the cheerful voices never failed or flagged. I dozed and 
drowsed, while East and West in my mind wove a web 
whose pattern I cannot trace. But a pattern there is. 
And some day historians will be able to find it. 



[29] 



VIII 

SRI RAMAKRISHNA 

As we dropped down the Hooghly they pointed to a 
temple on the shore as lately the home of Sri Rama- 
krishna. He was only a name to me, and I did not pay 
much attention, though I had his "Gospel" 1 actually 
under my arm. I was preoccupied with the sunset, 
burning behind a veil of smoke; and presently, as we 
landed, with the great floating haystacks smouldering 
at the wharf in the red afterglow. As we waited for 
the tram, someone said, " Would you like to see Kali?" 
and we stepped aside to the little shrine. Within it 
was the hideous idol, black and many-armed, decked 
with tinsel and fed with the blood of goats; and there 
swept over me a wave of the repulsion I had felt from 
the first for the Hindu religion, its symbols, its cult, 
its architecture, even its philosophy. Seated in the tram, 
it was with an effort that I opened the "Gospel" of Sri 
Ramakrishna. But at once my attention was arrested. 
This was an account by a disciple of the life and sayings 
of his master. And presently I read the following : 



Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Second Edition. Part I. Madras: 
Published by the Ramakrishna Mission. 191 2. 

[30] 



SRI RAMAKRISHNA 

"Disciple. Then, sir, one may hold that God is 'with 
form.' But surely He is not the earthen image that is 
worshipped! 

"Master. But, my dear sir, why should you call it an 
earthen image? Surely the Image Divine is made of the 
Spirit! 

"The disciple cannot follow this. He goes on: But is 
it not one's duty, sir, to make it clear to those who wor- 
ship images that God is not the same as the clay form they 
worship, and that in worshipping they should keep God 
Himself in view and not the clay images? 

"Master. You talk of 'images made of clay.' Well, 
there often comes a necessity of worshipping even such 
images as these. God Himself has provided these various 
forms of worship. The Lord has done all this — to suit 
different men in different stages of knowledge. 

"The mother so arranges the food for her children that 
every one gets what agrees with him. Suppose she has 
five children. Having a fish to cook, she makes different 
dishes out of it. She can give each one of the children 
what suits him exactly. One gets rich polow with the 
fish, while she gives only a little soup to another who is 
of weak digestion; she makes a sauce of sour tamarind for 
the third, fries the fish for the fourth, and so on, exactly 
as it happens to agree with the stomach. Don't you see? 

"Disciple. Yes, sir, now I do. The Lord is to be wor- 
shipped in the image of clay as a spirit by the beginner. 

[31] 



APPEARANCES 

The devotee, as he advances, may worship Him indepen- 
dently of the image. 

"Master. Yes. And again, when he sees God he 
realises that everything — image and all — is a mani- 
festation of the Spirit. To him the image is made of 
Spirit — not of clay. God is a Spirit." 

As I read this, I remembered the answer invariably 
given to me when I asked about Hindu idolatry. The 
people, I was told, even the humblest and most ignorant, 
worshipped not the idol but what it symbolised. Actu- 
ally, this hideous Kali stood to them for the Divine Mother. 
And I was told of an old woman, racked with rheumatism, 
who had determined at last to seek relief from the god- 
dess. She returned with radiant face. She had seen the 
Mother! And she had no more rheumatism. In this 
popular religion, it would seem, the old cosmic elements 
have dropped out, and the human only persist. So that 
even the terrifying form of Shiva, the Destroyer, stands 
only for the divine husband of Parvati, the divine wife. 
Hinduism, I admitted, is not as inhuman and superstitious 
as it looks. ButI admitted it reluctantly and with manyre- 
serves, remembering all I had seen and heard of obscene rites 
and sculptures, of the perpetual repetition of the names of 
God, of parasitic Brahmins and self-torturing ascetics. 

What manner of man, then, was this Sri Ramakrishna? 
I turned the pages and read: 

"The disciples were walking about the garden. M. 

[32] 



SRI RAMAKRISHNA 

walked by himself at the cluster of five trees. It is about 
five in the afternoon. Coming back to the veranda, 
north of the Master's chamber, M. comes upon a strange 
sight. The Master is standing still. Narendra is sing- 
ing a hymn. He and three or four other disciples are 
standing with the Master in their midst. M. is charmed 
with their song. Never in his life has he heard a sweeter 
voice. Looking at the Master, M. marvels and becomes 
speechless. The Master stands motionless. His eyes 
are fixed. It is hard to say whether he is breathing or 
not. This state of ecstasy, says a disciple in low tones, 
is called Samadhi. M. has never seen or heard of any- 
thing like this. He thinks to himself, 'Is it possible that 
the thought of God can make a man forget the world? 
How great must be his faith and love for God who is 
thrown into such a state! '" 

" Yes," I said, "that is the Hindu ideal — ecstatic con- 
templation." Something in me leapt to approve it; 
but the stronger pull was to Hellenism and the West. 
"Go your way, Ramakrishna," I said, "but your way 
is not mine. For me and my kind action not medita- 
tion; the temporal, not the eternal; the human, not the 
ultra-divine; Socrates not Ramakrishna!" But hardly 
had I said the words when I read on: 

"M. enters. Looking at him the Master laughs and 
laughs. He cries out, 'Why, look! There he is again!' 

[33] 



APPEARANCES 

The boys all join in the merriment. M. takes his seat, 
and the Master tells Narendra and the other disciples 
what has made him laugh. He says: 

" 'Once upon a time a small quantity of opium was 
given to a certain peacock at four o'clock in the after- 
noon. Well, punctually at four the next afternoon, 
who should come in but the selfsame peacock, longing 
for a repetition of the favour — another dose of opium!' 
— (Laughter.) 

"M. sat watching the Master as he amused himself 
with the boys. He kept up a running fire of chaff, and 
it seemed as if these boys were his own age and he was 
playing with them. Peals of laughter and brilliant flashes 
of humour follow upon one another, calling to mind the 
image of a fair when the Joy of the World is to be had 
for sale." 

I rubbed my eyes. Was this India or Athens? Is 
East East? Is West West? Are there any opposites 
that exclude one another? Or is this all-comprehensive 
Hinduism, this universal toleration, this refusal to recog- 
nise ultimate antagonisms, this "mush," in a word, as my 
friends would dub it — is this, after all, the truest and 
profoundest vision? 

And I read in my book: 

"M.'s egotism is now completely crushed. He thinks 
to himself: What this God-man says is indeed per- 

[34] 



SRI RAMAKRISHNA 

fectly true. What business have I to go about preach- 
ing to others ? Have I myself known God ? Do I love 
God? About God I know nothing. It would indeed 
be the height of folly and vulgarity itself of which I should 
be ashamed, to think of teaching others! This is not 
mathematics, or history, or literature; it is the science of 
God! Yes, I see the force of the words of this holy man." 



l3Sl 



IX 

THE MONSTROUS REGIMEN OF WOMEN 

Here at Cape Comorin, at India's southernmost point s 
among the sands and the cactuses and the palms rattling 
in the breeze, comes to us news of the Franchise Bill 
and of militant suffragettes. And I reflect that in this 
respect England is a "backward" country and Tra van- 
core an "advanced" one. Women here — except the 
Brahmin women — are, and always have been, politically 
and socially on an equality and more than an equality 
with men. For this is one of the few civilised States — 
for aught I know it is the only one — in which "matri- 
archy" still prevails. That doesn't mean — though the 
word suggests it — that women govern, though, in fact, 
the succession to the throne passes to women equally 
with men. But it means that woman is the head of 
the family, and that property follows her line, not the 
man's. All women own property equally with men, and 
own it in their own right. The mother's property passes 
to her children, but the father's passes to his mother's 
kin. The husband, in fact, is not regarded as related to 
the wife. Relationship means descent from a common 
mother, whereas descent from a common father is a 

[36] 



THE MONSTROUS REGIMEN OF WOMEN 

negligible fact, no doubt because formerly it was a ques- 
tionable one. Women administer their own property and, 
as I am informed, administer it more prudently than the 
men. 

Not only so; they have in marriage the superior position 
occupied by men in the West. The Nair woman chooses 
her own husband; he comes to her house, she does not go 
to his; and, till recently, she could dismiss him as soon 
as she was tired of him. The law — man-made, no doubt! 
— has recently altered this, and now mutual consent is 
required for a valid divorce. Still the woman is, at least 
on this point, on an equality with the man. And the 
heavens have not yet fallen. As to the vote, it is not so 
important or so general here as at home. The people 
live under a paternal monarchy "by right divine. " The 
Rajah who consolidated the kingdom, early in the eigh- 
teenth century, handed it over formally to the god of the 
temple, and administers it in his name. Incidentally, 
this gave him access to temple revenues. It also makes 
his person sacred. So much so that in a recent prison 
riot, when the convicts escaped and marched to the 
police with their grievances, the Rajah had only to ap- 
pear and tell them to march back to prison, and they did 
so to a man, and took their punishment. The govern- 
ment, it will be seen, is not by votes. Still there are votes 
for local councils, and women have them equally with men. 
Any other arrangement would have seemed merely pre- 
posterous to the Nairs; and perhaps if any exclusion had 

[37] 



APPEARANCES 

been contemplated it would have been of men rather than 
of women. 

Other incidental results follow from the equality of 
the sexes. The early marriages which are the curse of 
India do not prevail among the Nairs. Consequently 
the schooling of girls is continued later. And this State 
holds the record in all India for female education. We 
visited a school of over 600 girls, ranging from infancy to 
college age, and certainly I never saw schoolgirls look 
happier, keener, or more alive. Society, clearly, has not 
gone to pieces under "the monstrous regimen of women. ,, 
Travancore claims, probably with justice, to be the pre- 
mier native State; the most advanced, the most pros- 
perous, the most happy. Because of the position of 
women? Well, hardly. The climate is delightful, the 
soil fertile, the natural resources considerable. Every 
man sits under his own palm tree, and famine is unknown. 
The people, and especially the children, are noticeably 
gay, in a land where gaiety is not common. But one need 
not be a suffragette to hold that the equality of the sexes 
is one element that contributes to its well-being, and to 
feel that in this respect England lags far behind Tra- 
vancore. 

Echoes of the suffrage controversy at home have led 
me to dwell upon this matter of the position of women. 
But, to be candid, it will not be that that lingers in my 
mind when I look back upon my sojourn here. What 
then? Perhaps a sea of palm leaves, viewed from the 

[38] 



THE MONSTROUS REGIMEN OF WOMEN 

lighthouse top, stretching beside the sea of blue waves; 
perhaps a sandy riverbed, with brown, nude figures 
washing clothes in the shining pools; perhaps the oiled 
and golden skins glistening in the sun; perhaps naked 
children astride on their mothers' hips, or screaming 
with laughter as they race the motor-car; perhaps the 
huge, tusked elephant that barred our way for a moment 
yesterday; perhaps the jungle teeming with hidden and 
menacing life; perhaps the seashore and its tumbling 
waves. One studies institutions, but one does not love 
them. Often one must wish that they did not exist, or 
existed in such perfection that their existence might be 
unperceived. Still, as institutions go, this, which regu- 
lates the relations of men and women, is, I suppose, the 
most important. So from the surf of the Arabian sea and 
the blaze of the Indian sun I send this little object lesson. 



[39] 



X 

THE BUDDHA AT BURUPUDUR 

To the north the cone of a volcano, rising sharp and black. 
To the east another. South and west a jagged chain of 
hills. In the foreground ricefields and cocoa palms. 
Everywhere intense green, untoned by grey; and in the 
midst of it this strange erection. Seen from below and 
from a distance it looks like a pyramid that has been 
pressed flat. In fact, it is a series of terraces built round 
a low hill. Six of them are rectangular; then come three 
that are circular; and on the highest of these is a solid 
dome, crowned by a cube and a spire. Round the cir- 
cular terraces are set, close together, similar domes, but 
hollow, and pierced with lights, through which is seen in 
each a seated Buddha. Seated Buddhas, too, line the 
tops of the parapets that run round the lower terraces. 
And these parapets are covered with sculpture in high 
relief. One might fancy one's self walking round one of 
the ledges of Dante's "Purgatorio" meditating instruc- 
tion on the walls. Here the instruction would be for the 
selfish and the cruel. For what is inscribed is the legend 
and cult of the lord of tenderness. Much of it remains 
undeciphered and unexplained. But on the second ter- 

[40] 



THE BUDDHA AT BURUPUDUR 

race is recorded, on one side, the life of Sakya-Muni; on 
the other, his previous incarnations. The latter, taken 
from the " Jatakas," are naive and charming apologues. 

For example: Once the Buddha lived upon earth as 
a hare. In order to test him Indra came down from 
heaven in the guise of a traveller. Exhausted and faint, 
he asked the animals for help. An otter brought fish, 
a monkey fruit, a jackal a cup of milk. But the hare had 
nothing to give. So he threw himself into a fire, that 
the wanderer might eat his roasted flesh. Again: Once 
the Buddha lived upon earth as an elephant. He was 
met by seven hundred travellers, lost and exhausted with 
hunger. He told them where water would be found, and, 
near it, the body of an elephant for food. Then, hasten- 
ing to the spot, he flung himself over a precipice, that he 
might provide the meal himself. Again: Once the 
Buddha lived upon earth as a stag. A king, who was 
hunting him, fell into a ravine. Whereupon the stag 
halted, descended, and helped him home. All round the 
outer wall run these pictured lessons. And opposite is 
shown the story of Sakya-Muni himself. We see the 
new-born child with his feet on lotuses. We see the fatal 
encounter with poverty, sickness, and death. We see the 
renunciation, the sojourn in the wilderness, the attain- 
ment under the bo-tree, the preaching of the Truth. 
And all this sculptured gospel seems to bring home to 
one, better than the volumes of the learned, what Bud- 
dhism really meant to the masses of its followers. It 

[41] 



APPEARANCES 

meant, surely, not the denial of the soul or of God, but 
that warm impulse of pity and love that beats still in these 
tender and human pictures. It meant not the hope or 
desire for extinction, but the charming dream of thousands 
of lives, past and to come, in many forms, many conditions, 
many diverse fates. The pessimism of the master is as 
little likely as his high philosophy to have reached the 
mind or the heart of the people. The whole history of 
Buddhism, indeed, shows that it did not, and does not. 
What touched them in him was the saint and the lover 
of animals and men. And this love it was that flowed in 
streams over the world, leaving wherever it passed, in 
literature and art, in pictures of flowers or mountains, in 
fables and poems and tales, the trace of its warm and 
humanising flood. 

Still, there is the other Buddhism, the Buddhism of 
the thinker; his theory of human life, its value and pur- 
pose. And it was this that filled my mind later as I sat 
on the summit next to a solemn Buddha against the setting 
sun. For a long time I was silent, meditating his doc- 
trine. Then I spoke of children, and he said, "They grow 
old." I spoke of strong men, and he said, "They grow 
weak." I spoke of their work and achievement, and he 
said, "They die." The stars came out, and I spoke of 
eternal law. He said, "One law concerns you — that 
which binds you to the wheel of life." The moon rose, 
and I spoke of beauty. He said, "There is one beauty — 
that of a soul redeemed from desire." Thereupon the 

[42] 



THE BUDDHA AT BURUPUDUR 

West stirred in me, and cried "No!" "Desire," it said, 
"is the heart and essence of the world. It needs not and 
craves not extinction. It needs and craves perfection. 
Youth passes; strength passes; life passes. Yes! What 
of it? We have access to the youth, the strength, 
the life of the world. Man is born to sorrow. Yes! 
But he feels it as tragedy and redeems it. Not 
round life, not outside life, but through life is the 
way. Desire more and more intense, because more and 
more pure; not peace, but the plenitude of experience. 
Your foundation was false. You thought man wanted 
rest. He does not. We at least do not, we of the West. 
We want more labour; we want more stress; we want 
more passion. Pain we accept, for it stings us into life. 
Strife we accept, for it hardens us to strength. We believe 
in action; we believe in desire. And we believe that by 
them we shall attain." So the West broke out in me; and 
I looked at him to see if he was moved. But the calm 
eye was untroubled, unruffled the majestic brow, unper- 
plexed the sweet, solemn mouth. Secure in his Nirvana, 
he heard or he heard me not. He had attained the life- 
in-death he sought. But I, I had not attained the life in 
life. Unhelped by him, I must go my way. The East, 
perhaps, he had understood. He had not understood 
the West. 



[43] 



XI 

A MALAY THEATRE 

It seems to be a principle among shipping companies 
so to arrange their connections that the traveller should 
be compelled to spend some days in Singapore. We 
evaded this necessity by taking a trip to Sumatra, but 
even so a day and a night remained to be disposed of. 
We devoted the morning to a bath and a lunch at the 
Sea View Hotel, and the afternoon to the Botanical 
Gardens, where the most attractive flowers are the chil- 
dren and the most interesting gardeners their Chinese 
nurses. There remained the evening, and we asked 
about amusements. There was a bioscope, of course; 
there is always a bioscope; we had found one even in 
the tiny town of Medan, in Sumatra. There was also 
an opera company, performing the "Pink Girl." We 
seemed to know all about her without going to see her. 
Was there nothing else? Yes; a Malay theatre. That 
sounded attractive. So we took the tram through the 
Chinese quarter, among the "Ah Sins" and "Hup Chows," 
where every one was either a tailor or a washerman, and 
got down at a row of red lights. This was the Alexandra 
Hall, and a bill informed us that the performers were the 

[44] 



A MALAY THEATRE 

Straits Opera Company. This dismayed us a little. 
Still, we paid our dollars, and entered a dingy, dirty room, 
with a few Malays occupying the back benches and a 
small group of Chinese women and children in either 
balcony. We took our seats with half a dozen coloured 
aristocrats in the front rows, and looked about us. We 
were the only Europeans. But, to console us in our 
isolation, on either side of the proscenium was painted a 
couple of Italians in the act of embracing as one only em- 
braces in opera. We glanced at our programme and saw 
that the play was the "Moon Princess," and that Afrid, a 
genie, figured in the cast. It was then, at least, Ori- 
ental, though it could hardly be Malay, and our spirits 
rose. But the orchestra quickly damped them; there was 
a piano, a violin, a 'cello, a clarionet, and a cornet, and 
from beginning to end of the performance they were 
never in tune with themselves or with the singers. And 
the music? It was sometimes Italian, sometimes Span- 
ish, never, as far as I could detect, Oriental, and always 
thoroughly and frankly bad. 

No matter! The curtain rose and displayed a garden. 
The Prince entered. He was dressed in mediaeval Italian 
costume (a style of dress, be it said once for all, which 
was adopted by the whole company). With gestures of 
ecstatic astonishment he applied his nose to the paper 
roses. Then he advanced and appeared to sing, for his 
mouth moved; but the orchestra drowned any notes he 
may have emitted. The song finished, he lay down upon 

[45] 



APPEARANCES 

a couch and slept. Whereupon there entered an ugly 
little girl in a short white frock and black stockings and 
ribbons, with an expression of fixed gloom upon her face, 
and began to move her feet and arms in a parody of Ori- 
ental dancing. We thought at first that she was the 
Moon Princess, and felt a pang of disappointment. But 
she turned out to be the Spirit of Dreams; and presently 
she ushered in the real Princess, with whom, on the spot, 
the Prince, unlike ourselves, became violently enamoured. 
She vanished, and he woke to find her a vision. Despair 
of the Prince; despair of the King; despair of the Queen, 
not unmixed with rage, to judge from her voice and 
gestures. Consultation of an astrologer. Flight of the 
Prince in search of his beloved. Universal bewilder- 
ment and incompetence, such as may be witnessed any 
day in the East when anything happens at all out of 
the ordinary way. At this point enter the comic relief, 
in the form of woodcutters. I am inclined to suppose, 
from the delight of the audience, that there was some- 
thing genuine here. But whatever it was we were un- 
able to follow it. Eventually the woodcutters met Afrid, 
whether by chance or design I could not discover. At 
any rate, their reception was rough. To borrow the words 
of the synopsis, "a big fight arose and they were thrown 
to space"; but not till they had been pulled by the hair 
and ears, throttled and pummelled, to the general satis- 
faction, for something like half an hour. 
The next scenes were equally vigorous. The synopsis 

[46] 



A MALAY THEATRE 

describes them thus: "Several young princes went to 
Genie Janar, the father of the Moon Princess, to demand 
her in marriage. Afrid, a genie, met the princes, and, 
after having a row, they were all thrown away." The 
row was peculiar. Afrid took them on one by one. 
The combatants walked round one another, back to back, 
making feints in the air. Then the Prince got a blow 
in, which Afrid pretended to feel. But suddenly, with 
a hoarse laugh, he rushed again upon the foe, seized 
him by the throat or the arm, and (I cannot improve on 
the phrase) " threw him away." After all four princes 
were thus disposed of I left, being assured of a happy 
ending by the account of the concluding scene: "The 
Prince then took the Moon Princess to his father's 
kingdom, where he was married to her amidst great 
rejoicings.' ' 

Comment perhaps is superfluous. But as I went 
home in my rickshaw my mind went back to those even- 
ings in India when I had seen Indian boys perform to 
Indian music, dances and plays in honour of Krishna, 
and to the Bengal village where the assembled inhabi- 
tants had sung us hymns composed by their native 
saint. And I remembered that everywhere, in Egypt, 
in India, in Java, in Sumatra, in Japan, the gramophone 
has made its way; that an inferior kind of harmonium is 
displacing the native instruments; and that the bioscope 
— that great instrument of education — is familiarising 
the peasants of the East with all that is most vulgar 

[47] 



APPEARANCES 

and most shoddy in the humour and sentiment of the 
West. 

The Westernising of the East must come, no doubt, 
and ought to come. But in the process what by-products 
of waste, or worse! Once, surely, there must have been 
a genuine "Malay theatre." This is what Europe has 
made of it. 



[48] 



PART II 
CHINA 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF CHINA 

Some recent travellers have expressed disappointment 
or even disgust with what they saw or learned or guessed 
of China. My own first impression is quite contrary. 
The climate, it is true, for the moment, inclines one to 
gloomy views. An icy wind, a black sky, a cold drizzle. 
March in England could hardly do worse. But in Can- 
ton one almost forgets all that. Imagine a maze of nar- 
row streets, more confused and confusing than Venice; 
high houses (except in the old city) ; and hanging parallel 
to these, in long, vertical lines, flags and wooden signs 
inscribed with huge, Chinese characters, gold on black, 
gold on red, red or blue on white, a blaze of colour; and 
under it, pouring in a ceaseless stream, yellow faces, 
black heads, blue jackets and trousers, all on foot or borne 
on chairs, not a cart or carriage, rarely a pony, nobody 
crowding, nobody hustling or jostling, an even flow of 
cheerful humanity, inexhaustible, imperturbable, con- 
vincing one at first sight of the truth of all one has heard 
of the order, independence, and vigour of this extraor- 
dinary people. The shops are high and spacious, level with 
the street, not, as in India, raised on little platforms; and 

[51] 



APPEARANCES 

commonly, within, they are cut across by a kind of arch 
elaborately carved and blazing with gold. Every trade may 
be seen plying — jade-cutters, cloth-rollers, weavers, ring- 
makers, rice-pounders, a thousand others. Whole animals, 
roasted, hang before the butchers' shops; ducks, pigs — even 
we saw a skinned tiger! The interest is inexhaustible; and 
one is lucky if one does not return with a light purse and a 
heavy burden of forged curios. Even the American tourist, 
so painfully in evidence at the hotel, is lost, drowned in this 
native sea. He passes in his chair; but, like one's self, he is 
only a drop in the ocean. Canton is China, as Benares is 
India. And that conjunction of ideas set me thinking. 

To come from India to China is like waking from a 
dream. Often in India I felt that I was in an enchanted 
land. Melancholy, monotony, austerity; a sense as of 
perennial frost, spite of the light and heat; a lost region 
peopled with visionary forms; a purgatory of souls doing 
penance till the hour of deliverance shall strike; a limbo, 
lovely but phantasmal, unearthly, over-earthly — that 
is the kind of impression India left on my mind. I reach 
China, awake, and rub my eyes. This, of course, is the 
real world. This is every-day. Good temper, industry, 
intelligence. Nothing abnormal or overstrained. The 
natural man, working, marrying, begetting and rearing 
children, growing middle-aged, growing old, dying — and 
that is all. Here it is broad daylight; but in India, moon 
or stars, or a subtler gleam from some higher heaven. 
Recall, for example, Benares — the fantastic buildings 

[52] 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF CHINA 

rising and falling like a sea, the stairs running up to in- 
finity, the sacred river, the sages meditating on its banks, 
the sacrificial ablutions, the squealing temple-pipes, and, 
in the midst of this, columns of smoke, as the body returns to 
the elements and the soul to God. This way of disposing of 
the dead, when the first shock is over, lingers in the mind as 
something eminently religious. Death and dissolution take 
place in the midst of life, for death is no more a mystery 
than life. In the open air, in the press of men, the soul 
takes flight. She is no stranger, for everything is soul — 
houses, trees, men, the elements into which the body is re- 
solved. Death is not annihilation, it is change of form; 
and through all changes of form the essence persists. 

But now turn back to Canton. We pass the shops 
of the coffin-makers. We linger. But "No stop," says 
our guide; "better coffins soon." "Soon" is what the 
guide-books call the "City of the Dead." A number of 
little chapels; and laid in each a great lacquered coffin in 
which the dead man lives. I say "lives " advisedly, for 
there is set for his use a table and a chair, and every morn- 
ing he is provided with a cup of tea. A bunch of paper, 
yellow and white, symbolises his money; and perhaps a 
couple of figures represent attendants. There he lives, 
quite simply and naturally as he had always lived, until 
the proper time and place is discovered in which he may 
be buried. It may be months; it may be, or rather, might 
have been, years; for I am told that a reforming Govern- 
ment has limited the time to six months. And after 

[53] 



APPEARANCES 

burial? Why, presumably he lives still. But not with 
the life of the universal soul. Oh, no! There have been 
mystics in China, but the Chinese are not mystical. What 
he was he still is, an eating and drinking creature, and, one 
might even conjecture, a snob. For if one visits the family 
chapel of the Changs — another of the sights of Canton 
— one sees ranged round the walls hundreds of little 
tablets, painted green and inscribed in gold. These are 
the memorials of the deceased. And they are arranged in 
three classes, those who pay most being in the first and 
those who pay least in the third. One can even reserve 
one's place — first, second, or third — while one is still 
alive, by a white tablet. You die, and the green is sub- 
stituted. And so, while you yet live, you may secure 
your social status after death. How — how British! 
Yes, the word is out; and I venture to record a suspicion 
that has long been maturing in my mind. The Chinese 
are not only Western; among the Western they are Eng- 
lish. Their minds move as ours do; they are practical, 
sensible, reasonable. And that is why — as it would 
seem — they have more sympathy with Englishmen, if 
not with the English Government, than with any other 
Westerners. East may be East and West West, though 
I very much doubt it. But if there be any truth in the 
aphorism, we must define our terms. The East must be 
confined to India, and China included in the West. That 
as a preliminary correction. I say nothing yet about 
Japan. But I shall have more to say, I hope, about China. 

[54] 



II 

NANKING 

The Chinese, one is still told, cannot and will not change. 
On the other hand, Professor Ross writes a book entitled 
The Changing Chinese. And anyone may see that the 
Chinese educated abroad are transformed, at any rate 
externally, out of all recognition. In Canton I met some 
of the officials of the new Government; and found them, to 
the outward sense, pure Americans. The dress, the 
manners, the accent, the intellectual outfit — all complete! 
Whether, in some mysterious sense, they remain Chinese 
at the core I do not presume to affirm or deny. But an 
external transformation so complete must imply some 
inward change. Foreign residents in China deplore the 
Eoreign-educated product. I have met some who almost 
gnash their teeth at " young China." But this seems 
rather hard on China. For nearly a century foreigners 
have been exhorting her, at the point of the bayonet, 
to adopt Western ways and Western ideas. And when 
she begins to do so, the same people turn round and 
accuse her of unpardonable levity and treachery to her 
own traditions. What do foreigners want? the Chinese 
may well ask. I am afraid the true answer is, that they 

[55] 



APPEARANCES 

want nothing but concessions, interest on loans, and 
trade profits, at all and every cost to China. 

But I must not deviate into politics. What suggested 
this train of thought was the student-guide supplied 
me at Nanking by the American missionary college. 
There he was, complete American; and, I fear I must 
add, boring as only Americans can bore. Still, he showed 
me Nanking, and Nanking is worth seeing, though the 
interest of it is somewhat tragic. A wall 20 to 40 feet 
thick, 40 to 90 feet high, and 22 miles in circuit (I take 
these figures on trust) encloses an area larger than that 
of any other Chinese city. But the greater part of this 
area is fields and ruins. You pass through the city gate 
in the train, and find yourself in the country. You alight, 
and you are still in the country. A carriage takes you, 
in time, to the squalid village, or series of villages, where 
are housed the 350,000 inhabitants of modern Nanking. 
Among them are quartered the khaki-clad soldiers of new 
China, the new national flag draped at the gate of their 
barracks. Meantime old China swarms, unregenerate, 
in the narrow little streets, chaffering, chattering, laugh- 
ing in its rags as though there had never been a siege, a 
surrender, and a revolution. Beggars display their stumps 
and their sores, grovelling on the ground like brutes. 
Ragged children run for miles beside the carriage, singing 
for alms; and stop at last, laughing, as though it had been 
a good joke to run so far and get nothing for it. One 
monument in all this scene of squalor arrests attention 

[56] 



NANKING 

f — the now disused examination hall. It is a kind of 
rabbit-warren of tiny cells, six feet deep, four feet broad, 
and six feet high; row upon row of them, opening on nar- 
row, unroofed corridors; no doors now, nor, I should 
suppose, at any time, for it would be impossible to breathe 
in these boxes if they had lids. Here, for a week or a 
fortnight, the candidates sat and excogitated, unable to 
lie down at night, sleeping, if they could, in their chairs. 
And no wonder if, every now and again, one of them incon- 
tinently died and was hauled out, a corpse, through a 
hole in the wall; or went mad and ran amuck among ex- 
aminers and examinees. For centuries, as is well known, 
this system selected the rulers of China; and whole lives, 
from boyhood to extreme old age, were spent in preparing 
for the examinations. Now all this is abolished; and some 
people appear to regret it. Once more, what do the for- 
eigners want? 

The old imperial city, where once the Ming dynasty 
reigned, was destroyed in the Taiping Rebellion. The 
Tartar city, where before the revolution 3000 mandarins 
lived on their pensions, was burnt in the siege of 1911. 
Of these cities nothing remains but their huge walls and 
gates and the ruins of their houses. The principal in- 
terest of Nanking, the so-called "Ming tombs," lies 
outside the walls. And the interest is not the tombs, 
but the road to them. It is lined by huge figures carved 
out of monoliths. Brutes first — lions, camels, elephants, 
horses, a pair of each lying down and a pair standing; 

[57] 



APPEARANCES 

then human figures, military and civil officers. What 
they symbolise I cannot tell. They are said to guard 
the road. And very impressive they are in the solitude. 
Not so what they lead to, which is merely a hill, artificial, 
I suppose, piled on a foundation of stone. Once, my 
guide informed me, there was a door giving admission; 
and within, a complete house, with all its furniture, 
in stone. But the door is sealed, and for centuries 
no one has explored the interior. I suggested excava- 
tion, but was told the superstition of the inhabitants 
forbade it. "Besides," said my guide, "the Chinese 
are not curious." I wonder? Whether or no they are 
curious, they are certainly superstitious. Apropos, a 
gunboat ran aground on the Yangtse. The river was 
falling, and there seemed no chance of getting off for 
months. The officers made up their minds to it, and 
fraternised with the priest of a temple on the bank. The 
priest one day asked for a photograph of the boat. They 
gave him one, and he asked them to dinner. After din- 
ner he solemnly burnt the photograph to his god. And 
— "would you believe it?" — next day a freshet came 
down and set the vessel afloat. Which shows how super- 
stitions are generated and maintained in a world so little 
subject to law, on the surface of it, as ours. 

My anecdote has brought me to the Yangtse, and it is 
on a river-boat that I write. Hour after hour there 
passes by the panorama of hills and plain, of green wheat 
and yellow rape, of the great flood with its flocks of wild 

[58] 



NANKING 

duck, of fishers' cabins on the shore and mud-built, thatched 
huts, of junks with bamboo-threaded sails skimming on 
flat bottoms, of high cliffs with monasteries perched on 
perilous ledges, of changing light and shade, of burning 
sunset and the stars. Travelling by river is the best of 
all travelling — smooth, slow, quiet, and soothingly 
contemplative. All China, I am informed by some pessi- 
mists, is in a state of anarchy, actual or latent. It may 
be. But it is difficult to believe it among these primitive, 
industrious people living and working as they have lived 
and worked for 4000 years. Any other country, I suppose, 
in such a crisis as the present, would be seething with 
civil war. But China? When one puts the point to the 
foreigner who has been talking of anarchy he says, "Ah! 
but the Chinese are so peaceable! They don't mind 
whether there's a Government or no. They just go on 
without it!" Exactly! That is the wonderful thing. 
But even that seems to annoy the foreigner. Once more, 
what does he want? I give it up. 



[59] 



Ill 

IN THE YANGTSE GORGES 

At the upper end of the gorge poetically named "Ox 
Liver and Horse Lungs" I watched the steamboat 
smoking and splashing upstream. She had traversed 
in a few hours the distance I, in my houseboat, had taken 
three days to cover; and certainly she is much more con- 
venient and much more comfortable. That, however, is 
not necessarily an advantage. What may be urged with 
some force is that travelling by steamboat is more humane. 
It dispenses with human labour of a peculiarly dangerous 
and strenuous kind. Twenty-eight boatmen are attached 
to my single person. A big junk may have a crew of two 
hundred. When the wind is not fair they must row or tow; 
and towing is not like towing along the Thames ! Suddenly 
you see the men leap out and swarm up a precipice. Pres- 
ently they appear high above, creeping with the line along 
a ledge of rock. And your "boy" remarks nonchalantly, 
"Plenty coolie fall here. Too high place." Or they are 
clambering over boulders, one or two told off to disentangle 
the line wherever it catches. Or they are struggling along 
a greasy slope, their bare feet gripping the mud, hardly 
able to advance a step or even to hold their own. As a 

[60] 



IN THE YANGTSE GORGES 

labour-saving machine one must welcome the advent of 
the steamboat, as one is constrained to welcome even that 
of the motor-omnibus. But from the traveller's point of 
view it is different. Railways and steamboats enable more 
of us to travel, and to travel farther, in space. But in ex- 
perience he travels farthest who travels the slowest. A 
mediaeval student or apprentice walking through Europe 
on foot really did see the world. A modern tourist sees 
nothing but the inside of hotels. Unless, that is, he 
chooses to walk, or ride, or even cycle. Then it is different. 
Then he begins to see, as now I, from my houseboat, 
begin to see China. Not profoundly, of course, but some- 
how intimately. For instance, while my crew eat their 
midday rice, I stroll up to the neighbouring village. Con- 
trary to all I have been taught to expect, I find it charming, 
picturesque, not so dirty after all, not so squalid, not so 
poor. The people, too, who, one thought, would insult or 
mob the foreigner, either take no notice or, if you greet 
them, respond in the friendliest way. They may, of 
course, be explaining to one another that you are a foreign 
devil, but nothing in their countenance or manner suggests 
it. The children are far better-mannered than in most 
European countries. They may follow you, and chatter 
and laugh; but at least they have not learnt to beg. Curi- 
osity they have, and gaiety, but I detect no sign of hostil- 
ity. I walk down the long street, with its shops and roomy 
houses — far roomier and more prosperous-looking than 
most Indian villages — and come to the temple. Smilingly 

[61] 



APPEARANCES 

I am invited to enter. There are no mysteries in Chinese 
religion. I begin to wonder, indeed, whether there is any 
religion left. For everywhere I find the temples and 
monasteries either deserted or turned into schools or 
barracks. This one is deserted. It is like a series of lumber- 
rooms, full of dusty idols. The idols were once gaudy, 
brightly painted "to look like life," with beards and 
whiskers of real hair. But now their splendour is dimmed. 
The demons scowl to no purpose. To no purpose the 
dragons coil. No trespasser threatens the god behind his 
dingy curtains. In one chamber only a priest kneels before 
the shrine and chants out of a book while he taps a bronze 
vessel with a little hammer. Else, solitude, vacuity, and 
silence. Is he Buddhist or Taoist? I have no language in 
which to ask. I can only accept with mute gestures the 
dusty seat he offers and the cup of lukewarm tea. What 
has happened to religion? So far as I can make out, some- 
thing like the "disestablishment of the Church." The 
Republic has been at work; and in the next village I see 
what it has been doing. For there the temple is converted 
into a school. Delightedly the scholars show me round. 
On the outside wall, for him who runs to read, are scored 
up long addition sums in our Western figures. Inside, the 
walls are hung with drawings of birds and beasts, of the 
human skeleton and organs, even of bacteria! There are 
maps of China and of the world. The children even pro- 
duce in triumph an English reading-book, though I must 
confess they do not seem to have profited by it much. 

[62]' 



IN THE YANGTSE GORGES 

Still, they can say "cat" when you show them a picture 
of the creature; which is more than I could do in Chinese. 
And China does not change? Wait a generation! This, 
remember, is a tiny village in the heart of the country, 
more than iooo miles from the coast. And this is hap- 
pening all over the Celestial Empire, I suppose. I start to 
return to my boat, but have not gone a quarter of a mile 
before I hear a shout, and looking back find half the school 
following me and escorting their teacher, who speaks Eng- 
lish. He regrets to have missed my visit; will I not return 
and let him show me the school? I excuse myself, and he 
walks with me to the boat, making what conversation he 
can. One remark I remember — "China a good place 
now; China a republic." And I thought, as we exchanged 
cards, that he represented the Republic more essentially 
than the politicians whom foreigners so severely criticise. 
Anyhow, Republic or no, China is being transformed. And 
there is something other than steamboats to attest it. 

Which brings me back to my starting-point. On the 
steamboat you have no adventures. But on the house- 
boat you do. For instance, the other day the rope broke 
as we were towing up a rapid, and down we dashed, turn- 
ing round and round, and annihilating in five minutes the 
labour of an hour. I was afraid, I confess; but the boat- 
men took it as a matter of course. In some way, incompre- 
hensible to me, they got us into the bank, and, looking up, 
the first thing I saw was an embankment in construction — 
the railway from Ichang to Chungking. When it is finished 

[63] 



APPEARANCES 

we shall go by train — not even by steamboat — and so see 
nothing except tunnels. Certainly, we shall not be com- 
pelled to pass the night in a small village; nor permitted 
to see the sunset behind these lovely hills and the moon 
rising over the river between the cliffs of the gorge. Nor 
shall we then be delayed, as I was yesterday, till the water 
should run down, and so tempted to walk into the country. 
I made for a side valley, forded a red torrent, and found 
myself among fields and orchards; green of mulberries, 
green of fruit trees, green of young corn; and above, the 
purple hills, with all their bony structure showing under the 
skin of soil. I followed a high path, greeted by the peasants 
I met with a charming smile and that delightful gesture 
whereby, instead of shaking your hand, they clasp theirs and 
shake them at you. I came at last to a solitary place, and, 
sitting down, watched the evening light on the mountains; 
and they seemed to be saying something. What ? 

"Rocks that are bones, earth that is flesh, what, what do you mean 
Eyeing me silently ? 

Streams that are voices, what, what do you say? 
You are pouring an ocean into a cup. Yet pour, that all it can hold 
May at least be water of yours.' ' 

At dusk I got back to the river, and found that a wind 
had sprung up and the junks were trying to pass the rapid. 
There must have been fifty of them crowded together. 
They could only pass one by one; and the scene was pan- 
demonium. The Chinese are even noisier than the Italians, 

[6 4 ] 



IN THE YANGTSE GORGES 

and present the same appearance of confusion. But in some 
mysterious way an order is always getting evolved. On 
this occasion it seemed to be perfectly understood which 
boat should go first. And presently there she was, in mid- 
rapid, apparently not advancing an inch, the ropes held 
taut from a causeway a quarter of a mile off. At last the 
strain suddenly ceased, and she moved quickly upstream. 
Another followed. Then it was dark. And we had to 
pass the night, after all, tossing uneasily in the rough 
water. Soon after dawn we started again. I went across 
to the causeway, and watched the trackers at work — 
twenty each on two ropes, hardly advancing a step in five 
minutes. Then the boat's head swung into shore, the 
tension ceased; something had happened. I waited half an 
hour or so. " Nothing doing/' in the expressive American 
phrase. Then I went back. We had sprung a leak, and 
my cabin was converted into a swimming-bath. Another 
hour or so repairing this. Then the rope had to be brought 
back and attached again. At last we started for the second 
time, and in half an hour got safely through the hundred 
yards of racing waters into the bank above. At ten I got 
my breakfast, and we started to sail with a fair wind. It 
dropped. Rain came on. My crew (as always in that 
conjuncture) put up their awning and struck work. So 
here we are at i p.m., in a heavy thunder-shower, a mile 
from the place we tried to leave at six o'clock this morning. 
This is the ancient method of travelling — 4000 years old, 
I suppose. It is very inconvenient! Oh, yes — BUT! 

[65] 



IV 

PEKIN 

Professor Giles tells us, no doubt truly, that the 
Chinese are not a religious nation. No nation, I think, 
ever was, unless it be the Indians. But religious impulses 
sweep over nations and pass away, leaving deposits — 
rituals, priesthoods, and temples. Such an impulse once 
swept over China, in the form of Buddhism; and I am now 
visiting its deposit in the neighbourhood of Pekin. Scat- 
tered over the hills to the west of the city are a number of 
monastery temples. Some are deserted; some are let as 
villas to Europeans; some, like the one where I am staying, 
have still their complement of monks — in this temple, I 
am told, some three to four hundred. But neither here nor 
anywhere have I seen anything that suggests vitality in 
the religion. I entered one of the temples yesterday at 
dusk and watched the monks chanting and processing 
round a shrine from which loomed in the shadow a gigantic 
bronze-gold Buddha. They began to giggle like children 
at the entrance of the foreigner and never took their eyes 
off us. Later, individual monks came running round the 
shrines, beating a gong as though to call the attention of 
the deity, and shouting a few words of perfunctory praise 

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PEKIN 

or prayer. Irreverence more complete I have not seen 
even in Italy, nor beggary more shameless. Such is the 
latter end of the gospel of Buddha in China. It seems 
better that he should sit deserted in his Indian caves 
than be dishonoured by such mummeries. 

But once it must have been otherwise. Once this re- 
ligion was alive. And then it was that men chose these 
exquisite sites for contemplation. The Chinese Buddhist 
had clearly the same sense for the beauty of nature 
that the Italian Franciscans had. In secluded woods 
and copses their temples nestle, courts and terraces 
commanding superb views over the great plain to 
Pekin. The architecture is delicate and lovely; tiled roofs, 
green or gold or grey, cornices elaborately carved and 
painted in lovely harmonies of blue and green; fine trees 
religiously preserved; the whole building so planned and 
set as to enhance, not destroy, the lines and colour of the 
landscape. To wander from one of these temples to an- 
other, to rest in them in the heat of the day and sleep in 
them at night, is to taste a form of travel impossible in 
Europe now, though familiar enough there in the Middle 
Ages. Specially delightful is it to come at dusk upon a 
temple apparently deserted; to hear the bell tinkle as the 
wind moves it; to enter a dusky hall and start to see in a 
dark recess huge figures, fierce faces, glimmering maces 
and swords that seem to threaten the impious intruder. 

This morning there was a festival, and the people 
from the country crowded into the temple. Very bright 

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and gay they looked in their gala clothes. The women 
especially were charming; painted, it is true, but painted 
quite frankly, to better nature, not to imitate her. Their 
cheeks were like peaches or apples, and their dresses cor- 
respondingly gay. Why they had come did not appear; 
not, apparently, to worship, for their mood was anything 
but religious. Some, perhaps, came to carry away a little 
porcelain boy or girl as guarantee of a baby to come. For 
the Chinese, by appropriate rites, can determine the sex 
of a child — a secret unknown as yet to the doctors of 
Europe! Some, perhaps, came to cure their eyes, and 
will leave at the shrine a picture on linen of the organs 
affected. Some are merely there for a jaunt, to see the 
sights and the country. We saw a group on their way 
home, climbing a steep hill for no apparent purpose except 
to look at the view. What English agricultural labourer 
would do as much? But the Chinese are not " agri- 
cultural labourers''; they are independent peasants; 
and a people so gay, so friendly, so well-mannered and 
self-respecting I have found nowhere else in the world. 

The country round Pekin has the beauty we associate 
with Italy. First the plain, with its fresh, spring green, 
its dusty paths, its grey and orange villages, its cypress 
groves, its pagodas, its memorial slabs. Then the hills, 
swimming in amethyst, bare as those of Umbria, fine 
and clean in colour and form. For this beauty I was 
unprepared. I have even read that there is no natural 
beauty in China. And I was unprepared for Peking 

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PEKIN 

too. How can I describe it? At this time of year, 
seen from above, it is like an immense green park. You 
mount the tremendous wall, 40 feet high, 14 miles round, 
as broad at the top as a London street, and you look over 
a sea of spring-green tree-tops, from which emerge the 
orange-gold roofs of palaces and temples. You descend, 
and find the great roads laid out by Kubla Khan, running 
north and south, east and west, and thick, as the case 
may be, with dust or mud; and opening out of them a 
maze of streets and lanes, one-storyed houses, grey walls 
and roofs, shop fronts all ablaze with gilt carving, all 
trades plying, all goods selling, rickshaws, mule-carts 
canopied with blue, swarming pedestrians, eight hundred 
thousand people scurrying like ants in this gigantic frame- 
work of Cyclopean walls and gates. Never was a med- 
ley of greatness and squalor more strange and impressive. 
One quarter only is commonplace, that of the Legations. 
There is the Wagon-lits Hotel, with its cosmopolitan 
stream of Chinese politicians, European tourists, con- 
cession-hunters, and the like. There are the Americans, 
occupying and guarding the great north gate, and play- 
ing baseball in its precincts. There are the Germans, 
the Dutch, the French, the Italians, the Russians, the 
Japanese; and there, in a magnificent Chinese palace, 
are the British, girt by that famous wall of the siege on 
which they have characteristically written "Lest we 
forget!" Forget what? The one or two children who 
died in the Legation, and the one or two men who were 

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APPEARANCES 

killed? Or the wholesale massacre, robbery, and devasta- 
tion which followed when the siege was relieved? This 
latter, I fear, the Chinese are not likely to forget soon. 
Yet it would be better if they could. And better if the 
Europeans could remember much that they forget — ■ 
could remember that they forced their presence and the 
trade on China against her will; that their treaties were 
extorted by force, and their loans imposed by force, since 
they exacted from China what are ironically called " indem- 
nities " which she could not pay except by borrowing 
from those who were robbing her. If Europeans could 
remember and realise these facts they would perhaps 
cease to complain that China continues to evade their 
demands by the only weapon of the weak — cunning. 
When you have knocked a man down, trampled on him, 
and picked his pocket, you can hardly expect him to 
enter into social relations with you merely because you 
pick him up and, retaining his property, propose that 
you should now be friends and begin to do business. 
The obliquity of vision of the European residents on 
all these points is extraordinary. They cannot see 
that wrong has been done, and that wrong engenders 
wrong. They repeat comfortable formulae about the 
duplicity and evasiveness of the Chinese; they charge 
them with dishonesty at the very moment that they 
are dismembering their country; they attach intoler- 
able conditions to their loans, and then complain if their 
victims attempt to find accommodation elsewhere. Of 

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PEKIN 

all the Powers the United States alone have shown 
some generosity and fairness, and they are reaping their 
reward in the confidence of Young China. The Americans 
had the intelligence to devote some part of the excessive 
indemnity they exacted after the Boxer riots to educating 
Chinese students in America. Hundreds of these young 
men are now returned to China, with the friendliest feel- 
ing to America, and, naturally, anxious to develop poli- 
tical and commercial relations with her rather than with 
other Powers. British trade may suffer because British 
policy has been less generous. But British trade, I sup- 
pose, would suffer in any case. For the British continue 
to maintain their ignorance and contempt of China and 
all things Chinese, while Germans and Japanese are 
travelling and studying indefatigably all over the coun- 
try. "We see too much of things Chinese !" was the 
amazing remark made to me by a business man in Shang- 
hai. Too much! They see nothing at all, and want to 
6ee nothing. They live in the treaty ports, dine, dance, 
play tennis, race. China is in birth-throes, and they 
know and care nothing. A future in China is hardly 
for them. 



[71] 



V 

THE ENGLISHMAN ABROAD 

To write from China about the Englishman may seem 
an odd choice. But to see him abroad is to see him afresh. 
At home he is the air one breathes; one is unaware of 
his qualities. Against a background of other races you 
suddenly perceive him, and can estimate him — falla- 
ciously or no — as you estimate foreigners. 

So seen, the Englishman appears as the eternal school- 
boy. I mean no insult; I mean to express his qualities as 
well as his defects. He has the pluck, the zest, the sense 
of fair play, the public spirit of our great schools. He has 
also their narrowness and their levity. Enter his office, 
and you will find him not hurried or worried, not scheming, 
skimping, or hustling, but cheery, genial, detached, with 
an air of playing at work. As likely as not, in a quarter of 
an hour he will have asked you round to the club, and of- 
fered you a whisky and soda. Dine with him, and the 
talk will turn on golf or racing, on shooting, fishing, and 
the gymkhana. Or, if you wish to divert it, you must 
ask him definite questions about matters of fact. Prob- 
ably you will get precise and intelligent replies. But 
if you put a general question he will founder resent- 

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THE ENGLISHMAN ABROAD 

fully; and if you generalise yourself you will see him 
dismissing you as a windbag. Of the religion, the politics, 
the manners and customs of the country in which he lives, 
he will know and care nothing, except so far as they may 
touch his affairs. He will never, if he can help it, leave the 
limits of the foreign settlement. Physically he oscillates 
between his home, his office, the club, and the racecourse; 
mentally, between his business and sport. On all general 
topics his opinions are second or third hand. They are the 
ghosts of old prejudices imported years ago from England, 
or taken up unexamined from the English community 
abroad. And these opinions pass from hand to hand till 
they are as similar as pebbles on the shore. In an hour or 
so you will have acquired the whole stock of ideas current 
in the foreign community throughout a continent. Your 
only hope of new light is in particular instances and illustra- 
tions. And these, of course, may be had for the asking. 

But the Englishman abroad in some points is the 
Englishman at his best. For he is or has been a pioneer, 
at any rate in China. And pioneering brings out his most 
characteristic qualities. He loves to decide everything 
on his own judgment, on the spur of the moment, directly 
on the immediate fact, and in disregard of remoter con- 
tingencies and possibilities. He needs adventure to bring 
out his powers, and only really takes to business when 
business is something of a "lark. " To combine the func- 
tions of a trader with those of an explorer, a soldier, and a 
diplomat is what he really enjoys. So, all over the world, 

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APPEARANCES 






he opens the ways, and others come in to reap the fruit of 
his labours. This is true in things intellectual as in things 
practical. In science, too, he is a pioneer. Modern ar- 
chaeology was founded by English travellers. Darwin and 
Wallace and Galton in their youth pursued adventure as 
much as knowledge. When the era of routine arrives, when 
laboratory work succeeds to field work, the Englishman is 
apt to retire and leave the job to the German. The Eng- 
lishman, one might say, "larks" into achievement, the 
German " grinds" into it. The one, accordingly, is free- 
living, genial, generous, careless; the other laborious, 
exact, routine-ridden. It is hard for an Englishman to be 
a pedant; it is not easy for a German to be anything else. 
For philosophy no man has less capacity than the Eng- 
lishman. He does not understand even how such ques- 
tions can be put, still less how anyone can pretend to answer 
them. The philosopher wants to know whether, how, and 
why life ought to be lived before he will consent to live it. 
The Englishman just lives ahead, not aware that there is 
a problem; or convinced that, if there is one, it will only 
be solved "by walking." The philosopher proceeds from 
the abstract to the concrete. The Englishman starts with 
the concrete, and may or, more probably, may not arrive 
at the abstract. No general rules are of any use to him 
except such as he may have elaborated for himself out of 
his own experience. That is why he mistrusts education. 
For education teaches how to think in general, and that 
isn't what he wants or believes in. So, when he gets into 

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THE ENGLISHMAN ABROAD 

affairs, he discards all his training and starts again at the 
beginning, learning to think, if he ever does learn it, over 
his own particular job. And his own way, he opines, must 
be the right way for every one. Hence his contempt 
and even indignation for individuals or nations who are 
moved by " ideas." At this moment his annoyance with 
the leaders of " Young China" is provoked largely by the 
fact that they are proceeding on general notions of how a 
nation should be governed and organised, instead of start- 
ing with the particularities of their own society, and trying 
to mend it piece by piece and from hand to mouth. Be- 
fore they make a constitution, he thinks, they ought to 
make roads; and before they draw up codes, to extirpate 
consumption. The conclusion lies near at hand, and I have 
heard it drawn — "What they want is a few centuries of 
British rule." And, indeed, it is curious how constantly 
the Englishman abroad is opposed, in the case of other 
nations, to all the institutions and principles he is supposed 
to be proud of at home. Partly, no doubt, this is due to 
his secret or avowed belief that the whole world ought to 
be governed despotically by the English. But partly it is 
because he does not believe that the results the English 
have achieved can be achieved in any other way than 
theirs. They arrived at them without intention or fore- 
sight, by a series of detached steps, each taken without 
prescience of the one that would follow. So, and so only? 
can other nations arrive at them. He does not believe in 
short cuts, nor in learning by the experience of others. 

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And so the watchwords " Liberty," "Justice," "Constitu- 
tion," so dear to him at home, leave him cold abroad. Or, 
rather, they make him very warm, but warm not with zeal, 
but with irritation. 

Never was such a pourer of cold water on other people's 
enthusiasms. He cannot endure the profession that a man 
is moved by high motives. His annoyance, for example, 
with the "anti-opium" movement is not due to the fact 
that he supports the importation into China of Indian 
opium. Very commonly he does not. But the movement is 
an "agitation" (dreadful word!). It is "got up" by mis- 
sionaries. It purports to be based on moral grounds, and 
he suspects everything that so purports. Not that he is 
not himself moved by moral considerations. Almost in- 
variably he is. But he will never admit it for himself, and 
he deeply suspects it in others. The words "hypocrite," 
"humbug," "sentimentalist" spring readily to his lips. 
But let him work off his steam, sit quiet and wait, and you 
will find, often enough, that he has arrived at the same 
conclusion as the "sentimentalist" — only, of course, for 
quite different reasons! For intellect he has little use, ex- 
cept so far as it issues in practical results. He will forgive 
a man for being intelligent if he makes a fortune, but hardly 
otherwise. Still, he has a queer, half-contemptuous ad- 
miration for a definite, intellectual accomplishment which 
he knows it is hard to acquire and is not sure he could 
acquire himself. That, for instance, is his attitude to 
those who know Chinese. A "sinologue," he will tell you, 

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THE ENGLISHMAN ABROAD 

must be an imbecile, for no one but a fool would give so 
much time to a study so unprofitable. Still, in a way, he 
is proud of the sinologue — as the public school is proud 
of a boy so clever as to verge upon insanity, or a village 
is proud of the village idiot. Something of the same feeling, 
I sometimes think, underlies his respect for Shakspere. 
"If you want that kind of thing/ ' he seems to say to the 
foreigner, "and it's the kind of thing you would want, we 
can do it, you see, better than you can! " 

So with art. He is never a connoisseur, but he is often 
a collector. Partly, no doubt, because there is money in 
it, but that is a secondary consideration. Mainly be- 
cause collecting and collectors appeal to his sporting in- 
stinct. His knowledge about his collection will be precise 
and definite, whether it be postage stamps or pictures. He 
will know all about it, except its aesthetic value. That he 
cannot know, for he cannot see it. He has the flair of the 
dealer, not the perception of the amateur. And he does 
not know or believe that there is any distinction between 
them. 

But these, from his point of view, are trifles. What mat- 
ters it that he has pre-eminently the virtues of active life. 
He is fair-minded, and this, oddly, in spite of his difficulty 
in seeing another man's point of view. When he does see 
it he respects it. Whereas nimbler-witted nations see it 
only to circumvent and cheat it. He is honest; as honest, 
at least, as the conditions of modern business permit. He 
hates bad work, even when, for the moment, bad work 

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APPEARANCES 

pays. He hates skimping and sparing. And these qualities 
of his make it hard for him to compete with rivals less 
scrupulous and less generous. He is kind-hearted — much 
more so than he cares to admit. And at the bottom of all 
his qualities he has the sense of duty. He will shoulder 
loyally all the obligations he has undertaken to his country, 
to his family, to his employer, to his employees. The 
sense of duty, indeed, one might say with truth, is his 
religion. For on the rare occasions on which he can be 
persuaded to broach such themes you will find, I think, 
at the bottom of his mind that what he believes in is Some- 
thing, somehow, somewhere, in the universe, which helps 
him, and which he is helping, when he does right. There 
must, he feels, be some sense in life. And what sense would 
there be if duty were nonsense? 

Poets, artists, philosophers can never be at home with 
the Englishman. His qualities and his defects alike are 
alien to them. In his company they live as in prison, for 
it is not an air in which wings can soar. But for solid walk- 
ing on the ground he has not his equal. The phrase " Sol- 
vitur ambulando" must surely have been coined for him. 
And no doubt on his road he has passed, and will pass again, 
the wrecks of many a flying-machine. 



[78) 



VI 

CHINA IN TRANSITION 

The Chinese Revolution has proceeded, so far, with less 
disturbance and bloodshed than any great revolution 
known to history. There has been little serious fighting 
and little serious disorder; nothing comparable to that 
which accompanied, for instance, the French Revolution 
of 1789. And this, no doubt, is due to the fact that the 
Chinese are alone among nations of the earth in detesting 
violence and cultivating reason. Their instinct is always 
to compromise and save everybody's face. And this is the 
main reason why Westerners despise them. The Chinese, 
they aver, have "no guts." And when hard pressed as to 
the policy of the Western Powers in China, they will some- 
times quite frankly confess that they consider the West 
has benefited China by teaching her the use of force. That 
this should be the main contribution of Christian to Pagan 
civilisation is one of the ironies of history. But it is part 
of the greater irony which gave the Christian faith to 
precisely those nations whose fundamental instincts and 
convictions were and are in radical antagonism to its 
teaching. 
Though, however, it is broadly true that the Chinese 

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have relied on reason and justice in a way and to a degree 
which is inconceivable in the West, they have not been 
without their share of original sin. Violence, anarchy, 
and corruption have played a part in their history, though 
a less part than in the history of most countries. And 
these forces have been specially evident in that depart- 
ment to which Westerners are apt to pay the greatest 
attention — in the department of government. Govern- 
ment has always been less important in China than in 
the Western world; it has always been rudimentary in 
its organisation; and for centuries it has been incompetent 
and corrupt. Of this corruption Westerners, it is true, 
make more than they fairly should. China is no more 
corrupt (to say the least) than the United States, or Italy, 
or France, or than England was in the eighteenth century. 
And much that is called corruption is recognised and 
established "squeeze," necessary, and understood to be 
necessary, to supplement the inadequate salaries of officials. 
A Chinese official is corrupt much as Lord Chancellor 
Bacon was corrupt; and whether the Chancellor ought 
properly to be called corrupt is still matter of controversy. 
Moreover, the people have always had their remedy. 
When the recognised "squeeze" is exceeded, they protest 
by riot. So that the Chinese system, in the most un- 
favourable view, may be described as corruption tem- 
pered by anarchy. 

And this system, it is admitted, still prevails after the 
Revolution. Clearly, indeed, it cannot be extirpated 

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CHINA IN TRANSITION 

until officials are properly paid; and China is not in a 
position to pay for any reform while the Powers are 
drawing away an enormous percentage of her resources 
by that particular form of robbery called by diplomatists 
" indemnity.'' The new officials, then, are "corrupt" 
as the old ones were; and they are something more. They 
are Jacobins. Educated abroad, they are as full of ideas 
as was Robespierre or St. Just; and their ideas are even 
more divorced from sentiment and tradition. A foreign 
education seems to make a cut right across a Chinaman's 
life. He returns with a new head; and his head never 
gets into normal relations with his heart. That, I be- 
lieve, is the essence of Jacobinism, ideas working with 
enormous rapidity and freedom unchecked by the fly- 
wheel of traditional feelings. And it is Jacobinism that 
accounts for the extraordinary vigour of the campaign 
against opium. Many Europeans still endeavour to 
maintain that this campaign is not serious. But that is 
because Europeans simply cannot conceive that any body 
of men should be in as deadly earnest about a moral 
issue as are the representatives of Young China. The 
anti-opium campaign is not only serious, it is ruthless. 
Smokers are flogged and executed; poppy is rooted up; 
and farmers who resist are shot down. The other day in 
Hunan, it is credibly reported, some seventy farmers who 
had protested against the destruction of their crops were 
locked into a temple and burnt alive. An old man of 
seventy-six, falsely accused of growing poppy, was fined 

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APPEARANCES 

500 dollars, and when he refused to pay was flogged to 
death by the orders of a young official of twenty-two. 
Stories of this kind come in from every part of the coun- 
try; and though this or that story may be untrue or ex- 
aggerated, there can be no doubt about the general state 
of affairs. The officials are putting down opium with a 
vigour and a determination which it is inconceivable 
should ever be applied in the West to the traffic in alcohol. 
But in doing so they are showing a ruthlessness which 
does not seem to be native to the Chinese, and which 
perhaps is to be accounted for by what I have called 
Jacobinism, resulting from the effects of a Western edu- 
cation that has been unable to penetrate harmoniously 
the complicated structure of Chinese character. 

The anti-opium campaign is one example of the way 
in which the Revolution has elicited and intensified 
violence in this peace-loving people. Another example 
is the use of assassination. This has been an accom- 
paniment of all great revolutions. It took the form of 
"proscriptions " in Rome, of the revolutionary tribunals 
in France. In China it is by comparison a negligible 
factor; but it exists. Two months ago a prominent 
leader of the southern party was assassinated; and popular 
suspicion traces the murder to high Government officials, 
and even to the President himself. The other day a 
southern general was killed by a bomb. For the manu- 
facture of bombs is one of the things China has learned 
from the Christian West; and the President lives in con- 

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CHINA IN TRANSITION 

stant terror of this form of murder. China, it will be 
seen, does not altogether escape the violence that accom- 
panies all revolutions. Nor does she altogether escape 
the anarchy. Anarchy, indeed, that is a simple strike 
against authority, may be said to be part of the Chinese 
system. It is the way they have always enforced their 
notions of justice. A curious example has been recently 
offered by the students of the Pekin University. For 
various reasons — good or bad — they have objected to 
the conduct of their Chancellor. After ineffectual pro- 
tests, they called upon him in large numbers with his 
resignation written out, and requested him to sign it. He 
refused, whereupon they remarked that they would call 
again the next day with revolvers; and in the interval he 
saw wisdom and signed. Last week there was a similar 
episode. The new Chancellor proved as unpalatable as 
his predecessor. The students once more presented them- 
selves with his resignation written out. He refused to 
resign, and, as the students aver, scurrilously abused 
them. They proceeded to the Minister of Education, 
who refused to see them. Thereupon they camped 
out in his courtyard, and stayed all day and all night, 
sending a message to the professors dated "from under 
the trees of the Education Office," to explain that they 
were unfortunately unable to attend lectures. This 
Chancellor, too, it would seem, has seen wisdom and 
resigned. 
How strange it all seems to Western eyes! A country, 

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APPEARANCES 

we should suppose, where such things occur, is incapable 
of organisation. But it is certain that we are wrong. 
Our notion is that everything must be done by authority, 
and that unless authority is maintained there will be 
anarchy. The Chinese notion is that authority is there 
to carry out what the people recognise to be common sense 
and justice; if it does otherwise, it must be resisted; and if 
it disappears life will still go on — as it is going on now 
in the greater part of China — on the basis of the tradi- 
tional and essentially reasonable routine. Almost cer- 
tainly the students of the University had justice on their 
side; otherwise such action would not be taken; and when 
they get justice they will be more docile and orderly than 
our own undergraduates at home. 

Another thing surprising to European observers is 
the apparent belief of the Chinese in verbal remonstrance. 
Under the present regime officials and public men are 
allowed the free use of the telegraph. The consequence 
is that telegrams of advice, admonition, approval, blame, 
fear, hope, doubt pour in daily to the Government from 
civil and military governors, from members of Parliament 
and party leaders. In the paper to-day, for example, is a 
telegram from the Governors of seventeen provinces ad- 
dressed to the National Assembly. It begins as follows: 

"To the President, the Cabinet, the Tsan Yi Yuan, 
the Chung Yi Yuan, and the Press Association, — When 
the revolution took place at Wuchang, the various socie- 

[8 4 ] 



CHINA IN TRANSITION 

ties and groups responded, and when the Republic was 
inaugurated the troops raised among these bodies were 
gradually disbanded. For fear that, being driven by 
hunger, these disbanded soldiers would become a menace 
to the place, the various societies and groups have estab- 
lished a society at Shanghai called the Citizens' Pro- 
gressive Society, to promote the means of livelihood for 
the people, and the advancement of society, and the 
establishment has been registered in the offices of the 
Tutuhs of the provinces." 

Then follows a statement of the "six dangers" to 
which the country is exposed, an appeal to the Assembly 
to act more reasonably and competently, and then the 
following peroration: 

"The declarations of us, Yuan-hung and others, are 
still there, our wounds have not yet been fully recovered, 
and should the sea and ocean be dried up, our original 
hearts will not be changed. We will protect the Republic 
with our sinews and blood of brass and iron, we will 
take the lead of the province, and be their backbone, 
and we will not allow the revival of the monarchy and 
the suppression of the powers of the people. Let Heaven 
and earth be witness to our words. You gentlemen are 
pillars of the political parties, or the representatives of 
the people, and you should unite together and not become 
inconsistent. You first determined that the Loan is 

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necessary, but such opinion is now changed, and you now 
reject the Loan. Can the ice be changed into red coal 
in your hearts? Thus even those who love and admire 
you will not be able to defend your position. However, if 
you have any extraordinary plan or suggestion to save 
the present situation, you can show it to us." 

Some of the strange effect produced by this document 
is due, no doubt, to translation. But it, like the many 
others of the kind I have read, seems to indicate what 
is at the root of the Chinese attitude to life — a belief 
in the power of reason and persuasion. I have said 
enough to show that this attitude does not exclude the 
use of violence; but I feel sure that it limits it far more 
than it has ever been limited in Europe. Even in time of 
revolution the Chinese are peaceable and orderly to an 
extent unknown and almost unbelievable in the West. 
And the one thing the West is teaching them and priding 
itself on teaching them is the absurdity of this attitude. 
Well, one day it is the West that will repent because China 
has learnt the lesson too well. 



[86] 



vn 

A SACRED MOUNTAIN 

It was midnight when the train set us down at Tai- 
an-fu. The moon was full. We passed across fields, 
through deserted alleys where sleepers lay naked on 
the ground, under a great gate in a great wall, by halls 
and pavilions, by shimmering, tree-shadowed spaces, 
up and down steps, and into a court where cypresses 
grew. We set up our beds in a veranda, and woke to see 
leaves against the morning sky. .We explored the vast 
temple and its monuments — iron vessels of the Tang age, 
a great tablet of the Sungs, trees said to date from before 
the Christian era, stones inscribed with drawings of these 
by the Emperor Chien Lung, hall after hall, court after 
court, ruinous, overgrown, and the great crumbling walls 
and gates and towers. Then in the afternoon we began 
the ascent of Tai Shan, the most sacred mountain in 
China, the most frequented, perhaps, in the world. There, 
according to tradition, legendary emperors worshipped 
God. Confucius climbed it six centuries before Christ, 
and sighed, we are told, to find his native State so small. 
The great Chin-Shih-Huang was there in the third cen- 
tury b. c. Chien Lung in the eighteenth century covered 

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it with inscriptions. And millions of humble pilgrims 
for thirty centuries at least have toiled up the steep and 
narrow way. Steep it is, for it makes no detours, but 
follows straight up the bed of a stream, and the greater 
part of the five thousand feet is ascended by stone steps. 
A great ladder of eighteen flights climbs the last ravine, 
and to see it from below, sinuously mounting the pre- 
cipitous face to the great arch that leads on to the summit, 
is enough to daunt the most ardent walker. We at least 
were glad to be chaired some part of the way. A wonderful 
way! On the lower slopes it passes from portal to portal, 
from temple to temple. Meadows shaded with aspen 
and willow border the stream as it falls from green pool 
to green pool. Higher up are scattered pines. Else the 
rocks are bare — bare, but very beautiful, with that sig- 
nificance of form which I have found everywhere in the 
mountains in China. 

To such beauty the Chinese are peculiarly sensitive. 
All the way up the rocks are carved with inscriptions 
recording the charm and the sanctity of the place. Some 
of them were written by emperors; many, especially, by 
Chien Lung, the great patron of art in the eighteenth cen- 
tury. They are models, one is told, of caligraphy as well 
as of literary composition. Indeed, according to Chinese 
standards, they could not be the one without the other. 
The very names of favourite spots are poems in themselves. 
One is " the pavilion of the phoenixes " ; another " the foun- 
tain of the white cranes." A rock is called "the tower of 

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A SACRED MOUNTAIN 

the quickening spirit"; the gate on the summit is "the 
portal of the clouds." More prosaic, but not less charm- 
ing, is an inscription on a rock in the plain, "the place of 
the three smiles," because there some mandarins, meeting 
to drink and converse, told three peculiarly funny stories. 
Is not that delightful? It seems so to me. And so pecul- 
iarly Chinese! 

It was dark before we reached the summit. We put up 
in the temple that crowns it, dedicated to Ytl Huang, the 
"Jade Emperor" of the Taoists; and his image and those 
of his attendant deities watched our slumbers. But we did 
not sleep till we had seen the moon rise, a great orange disc, 
straight from the plain, and swiftly mount till she made the 
river, five thousand feet below, a silver streak in the dim 
grey levels. 

Next morning, at sunrise, we saw that, north and east, 
range after range of lower hills stretched to the horizon, 
while south lay the plain, with half a hundred streams 
gleaming down to the river from the valleys. Full in view 
was the hill where, more than a thousand years ago, the 
great Tang poet Li-tai-po retired with five companions to 
drink and make verses. They are still known to tradition 
as the "six idlers of the bamboo grove"; and the morning 
sun, I half thought, still shines upon their symposium. We 
spent the day on the mountain; and as the hours passed 
by, more and more it showed itself to be a sacred place. 
Sacred to what god? No question is harder to answer of 
any sacred place, for there are as many ideas of the god as 

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there are worshippers. There are temples here to various 
gods: to the mountain himself ; to the Lady of the moun- 
tain, Pi-hsia-yuen, who is at once the Venus of Lucretius — 
" goddess of procreation, gold as the clouds, blue as the 
sky," one inscription calls her — and the kindly mother 
who gives children to women and heals the little ones of 
their ailments; to the Great Bear; to the Green Emperor, 
who clothes the trees with leaves; to the Cloud-compeller; 
to many others. And in all this, is there no room for God? 
It is a poor imagination that would think so. When men 
worship the mountain, do they worship a rock, or the spirit 
of the place, or the spirit that has no place? It is the 
latter, we may be sure, that some men adored, standing 
at sunrise on this spot. And the Jade Emperor — is he 
a mere idol? In the temple where we slept were three in- 
scriptions set up by the Emperor Chien Lung. They run 
as follows: 

"Without labour, oh Lord, Thou bringest forth the greatest 

things." 
"Thou leadest Thy company of spirits to guard the whole world." 
"In the company of Thy spirits Thou art wise as a mighty Lord 

to achieve great works." 

These might be sentences from the Psalms; they are 
as religious as anything Hebraic. And if it be retorted 
that the mass of the worshippers on Tai Shan are super- 
stitious, so are, and always have been, the mass of wor- 
shippers anywhere. Those who rise to religion ia any 

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A SACRED MOUNTAIN 

country are few. India, I suspect, is the great exception. 
But I do not know that they are fewer in China than else- 
where. For that form of religion, indeed, which consists 
in the worship of natural beauty and what lies behind it 
— for the religion of a Wordsworth — they seem to be 
pre-eminently gifted. The cult of this mountain, and of 
the many others like it in China, the choice of sites for 
temples and monasteries, the inscriptions, the little pavil- 
ions set up where the view is loveliest — all go to prove 
this. In England we have lovelier hills, perhaps, than any 
in China. But where is our sacred mountain? Where, in 
all the country, that charming mythology which once in 
Greece and Italy, as now in China, was the outward ex- 
pression of the love of nature? 

"Great God, I'd rather be 

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn." 

That passionate cry of a poet born into a naked world 
would never have been wrung from him had he been born 
in China. 

And that leads me to one closing reflection. When 
lovers of China — " pro-Chinese,' ' as they are contemptu- 
ously called in the East — assert that China is more civil- 
ised than the modern West, even the candid Westerner, 
who is imperfectly acquainted with the facts, is apt to 
suspect insincere paradox. Perhaps these few notes on 

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Tai Shan may help to make the matter clearer. A people 
that can so consecrate a place of natural beauty is a 
people of fine feeling for the essential values of life. That 
they should also be dirty, disorganised, corrupt, incom- 
petent, even if it were true — and is far from being true in 
any unqualified sense — would be irrelevant to this issue. 
On a foundation of inadequate material prosperity they 
reared, centuries ago, the superstructure of a great culture. 
The West, in rebuilding its foundations, has gone far to 
destroy the superstructure. Western civilisation, wher- 
ever it penetrates, brings with it water-taps, sewers, and . 
police; but it brings also an ugliness, an insincerity, a 
vulgarity never before known to history, unless it be under 
the Roman Empire. It is terrible to see in China the first 
wave of this Western flood flinging along the coasts and 
rivers and railway lines its scrofulous foam of advertise- 
ments, of corrugated iron roofs, of vulgar, meaningless ar- 
chitectural forms. In China, as in all old civilisations I 
have seen, all the building of man harmonises with and 
adorns nature. In the West everything now built is a blot. 
Many men, I know, sincerely think that this destruction of 
beauty is a small matter, and that only decadent aesthetes 
would pay any attention to it in a world so much in need 
of sewers and hospitals. I believe this view to be pro- 
foundly mistaken. The ugliness of the West is a symptom 
of disease of the Soul. It implies that the end has been lost 
sight of in the means. In China the opposite is the case. 
The end is clear, though the means be inadequate. Con- 

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A SACRED MOUNTAIN 

sider what the Chinese have done to Tai Shan, and what 
the West will shortly do, once the stream of Western tour- 
ists begins to flow strongly. Where the Chinese have con- 
structed a winding stairway of stone, beautiful from all 
points of view, Europeans or Americans will run up a fu- 
nicular railway, a staring scar that will never heal. Where 
the Chinese have written poems in exquisite caligraphy, 
they will cover the rocks with advertisements. Where the 
Chinese have built a series of temples, each so designed 
and placed as to be a new beauty in the landscape, they 
will rim up restaurants and hotels like so many scabs 
on the face of nature. I say with confidence that they 
will, because they have done it wherever there is any chance 
of a paying investment. Well, the Chinese need, I agree, 
our science, our organisation, our medicine. But is it 
affectation to think they may have to pay too high a price 
for it, and to suggest that in acquiring our material ad- 
vantages they may lose what we have gone near to lose, 
that fine and sensitive culture which is one of the forms 
of spiritual life? The West talks of civilising China. 
Would that China could civilise the West! 



[93] 



PART III 
JAPAN 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 

Japan, surely, must be a mirage created by enchant- 
ment. Nothing so beautiful could be real. Take the 
west coast of Scotland, bathe it in Mediterranean light 
and sun, and let its waves be those of the Pacific. Take 
the best of Devonshire, enlarge the hills, extend the plains, 
and dominate all with the only perfect mountain in the 
world — a mountain that catches at your breath like a 
masterpiece of art. Make the copses woods, and the woods 
forests. For our fields with their hedgerows substitute the 
vivid green of rice, shining across the gleam of flooded 
plains. Everywhere let water flow; and at every water- 
fall and cave erect a little shrine to hallow the spot. Over 
the whole pour a flood of pure white light, and you have a 
faint image of Japan. Perhaps it is not, naturally, more 
beautiful than the British Isles — few countries are. But 
it is unspoilt by man, or almost so. Osaka, indeed, is as 
ugly as Manchester, Yokohama as Liverpool. But these 
are small blots. For the rest, Japan is Japan of the Middle 
Ages, and lovely as England may have been, when England 
could still be called merry. 
And the people are lovely, too. I do not speak of facial 

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beauty. Some may think, in that respect, the English or 
the Americans handsomer. But these people have the 
beauty of life. Instead of the tombstone masks that pass 
for faces among Anglo-Saxons, they have human features, 
quick, responsive, mobile. Instead of the slow, long limbs 
creaking in stiff integuments, they have active members, for 
the most bare or moving freely in loose robes. Instead of a 
mumbled, monotonous, machine-like emission of sound 
they have real speech, vivacious, varied, musical. Their 
children are the loveliest in the world; so gay, so sturdy, 
so cheeky, yet never rude. It is a pure happiness merely 
to walk in the streets and look at them. It is a pure hap- 
piness, I might almost say, to look at anyone, so gay is 
their greeting, so radiant their smile, so full of vitality their 
gestures. I do not know what they think of the foreigner, 
but at least they betray no animosity. They let his stiff, 
ungainly presence move among them unchallenged. Per- 
haps they are sorry for him; but I think they are never 
rude. I am speaking, of course, of Old Japan, of the Japan 
that is all in evidence, if one lands, as I did, in the south, 
avoids Osaka, and postpones Yokohama and Tokio. It is 
still the Japan of feudalism; a system in which I, for my 
part, do not believe; which, in its essence, in Japan as in 
Europe, was harsh, unjust, and cruel; but which had the 
art of fostering, or at least of not destroying, beauty. 

And in this point feudalism in Japan was finer and more 
sensitive, if it was less grandiose, than feudalism in Europe. 
There is nothing in Japan to compare with the churches 

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FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 

and cathedrals of the West, for there is no stone architec- 
ture at all. But there is nothing in the West to compare 
with the living-rooms of Japan. Suites of these dating from 
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are to be seen in 
Kyoto and elsewhere. And till I saw them I had no idea 
how exquisite human life might be made. The Japanese, 
as is well known, discovered the secret of emptiness. Their 
rooms consist of a floor of spotless matting, paper walls, 
and a wooden roof. But the paper walls, in these old 
palatial rooms, are masterpieces by great artists. From a 
background of gold-leaf emerge and fade away sugges- 
tions of river and coast and hill, of peonies, chrysanthe- 
mums, lotuses, of wild geese and swans, of reeds and pools, 
of all that is elusive and choice in nature; decorations that 
are also lyric poems, hints of landscape that yet never 
pretend to be a substitute for the real thing. The real thing 
is outside, and perhaps it will not intrude; for where we 
should have glass windows the Japanese have white paper 
screens. But draw back, if you choose, one of these screens, 
and you will see a little landscape garden, a little lake, a 
little bridge, a tiny rockery, a few gold-fish, a cluster of 
irises, a bed of lotus, and, above and beyond, the great 
woods. These are royal apartments; but all the cost, it 
will be seen, is lavished on the work of art. The principle 
is the same in humbler homes. 

People who could so devise life, we may be sure, are 
people with a fineness of perception unknown to the 
West, unless it were once in ancient Greece. The Jap- 

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anese, indeed, I suspect, are the Greeks of the East. 
In the theatre at Kyoto this was curiously borne in upon 
me. On the floor of the house reclined figures in loose 
robes, bare-necked and barefooted. On the narrow stage 
were one or two actors, chanting in measured speech, 
and moving slowly from pose to pose. From boxes on 
either side of the stage intoned a kind of chorus; and a 
flute and pizzicato strings accompanied the whole in the 
solemn strains of some ancient mode. I have seen nothing 
so like what a Greek play may have been, though doubtless 
even this was far enough away. And still more was I 
struck by the resemblance when a comedy succeeded to 
the tragedy, and I found the young and old Japan con- 
fronting one another exactly as the young and old Athens 
met in debate, two thousand years ago, in the Frogs of 
Aristophanes. The theme was an ascent of Mount 
Fuji; the actors two groups of young girls, one costumed 
as virgin priestesses of the Shinto cult, the other in modern 
European dress. The one set were climbing the mountain 
as a pilgrimage, the other as a lark; and they meet and 
exchange sharp dialectics (unintelligible to me, but not 
unguessable) on the lower slopes. The sympathies of 
the author, like those of Aristophanes, were with the old 
school. It is the pilgrims who reach the top and the 
modern young women who collapse. And the modern 
young man fares no better; he is beaten by a coolie and 
frightened by a ghost. The playwright had at least 
Aristophanes' gift of lampoon, though I doubt whether 

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FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 

he had a touch of his genius. Perhaps, however, he had 
a better cause. For, I doubt, modern Japan may de- 
serve lampooning more than the Athens of Aristophanes. 
For modern Japan is the modern West. And that — well, 
it seemed to be symbolised to me yesterday in the train. 
In my carriage were two Japanese. One was loosely 
wrapt in a kimono, bare throat and feet, fine features, 
fine gestures, everything aristocratic and distinguished. 
The other was clad in European dress, sprigged waist- 
coat, gold watch-chain, a coarse, thick-lipped face, a 
podgy figure. It was a hot July day, and we were passing 
through some of the loveliest scenery in the world. He 
first closed all doors and windows, and then extended 
himself at full length and went to sleep. There he lay, 
his great paunch sagging — prosperity exuding from every 
pore — an emblem and type of what in the West we call 
a "successful" man. And the other? The other, no 
doubt, was going downhill. Both, of course, were Japanese 
types; but the civilisation of the West chose the one and 
rejected the other. And if civilisation is to be judged, 
as it fairly may be, by the kind of men it brings to the 
top, there is much to be said for the point of view of my 
Tory playwright. 



[101] 



II 

A "NO" DANCE 

On entering the theatre I was invaded by a sense of se- 
renity and peace. There was no ornament, no upholstery, 
no superfluity at all. A square building of unvarnished 
wood; a floor covered with matting, exquisitely clean, and 
divided into little boxes, or rather trays (so low were the 
partitions), in which the audience knelt on their heels, 
beautiful in loose robes; running out from the back wall a 
square stage, with a roof supported by pillars; a passage 
on the same level, by which the actors entered, on the 
left; the screens removed from the outer walls, so that the 
hall was open to the air, and one looked out on sky and 
trees, or later on darkness, against which shone a few 
painted lanterns. Compare this with the Queen's Hall 
in London, or with any of our theatres, and realise 
the effect on one's mood of the mere setting of the 
drama. Drama was it? Or opera? Or what? It is called a 
"dance." But there was very little dancing. What 
mainly remains in my mind is a series of visual images, 
one more beautiful than another; figures seated motionless 
for minutes, almost for half -hours, with a stillness of stat- 
ues, not an eyelash shaking; or passing very slowly across 

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A "NO" DANCE 

the stage, with that movement of bringing one foot up 
to the other and pausing before the next step which is so 
ridiculous in our opera, but was here so right and so im- 
pressive; or turning slowly, or rising and sitting with 
immense deliberation; each figure right in its relation to 
the stage and to the others. All were clothed in stiff 
brocade, sumptuous but not gorgeous. One or two were 
masked; and all of them, I felt, ought to have been. The 
mask, in fact, the use of which in Greek drama I had 
always felt to be so questionable, was here triumphantly 
justified. It completed the repudiation of actuality 
which was the essence of the effect. It was a musical 
sound, as it were, made visible. It symbolised humanity, 
but it was not human, still less inhuman. I would rather 
call it divine. And this whole art of movement and cos- 
tume required that completion. Once I had seen a mask 
I missed it in all the characters that were without it. 

To me, then, this visual spectacle was the essence of 
the "No" dance. The dancing itself, when it came, was 
but a slight intensification of the slow and solemn posing 
I have described. There was no violence, no leaping, 
no quick steps; rather a turning and bending, a slow 
sweep of the arm, a walking a little more rhythmical, 
on the verge, at most, of running. It was never ex- 
citing, but I could not say it was never passionate. It 
seemed to express a kind of frozen or petrified passion; 
rather, perhaps, a passion run into a mould of beauty and 
turned out a statue. I have never seen an art of such 

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APPEARANCES 

reserve and such distinction. "Or of such tediousness," 
I seem to hear an impatient reader exclaim. Well, let 
me be frank. Like all Westerners, I am accustomed 
to life in quick time, and to an art full of episode, of intel- 
lectual content, of rapid change and rapid development. 
I have lost to a great extent that power of prolonging an 
emotion which seems to be the secret of Eastern art. I 
am bored — subconsciously, as it were — where an Ori- 
ental is lulled into ecstasy. His case is the better. But 
also, in this matter of the "No" dance he has me at a 
disadvantage. In the first place he can understand the 
words. These, it is true, have far less importance than 
in a drama of Shakspere. They are only a lyric or nar- 
rative accompaniment to the music and the dance. Still 
they have, one is informed, a beauty much appreciated 
by Japanese, and one that the stranger, ignorant of the 
language, misses. And secondly, what is worse, the music 
failed to move me. Whether this is my own fault, or 
that of the music, I do not presume to decide, for I do not 
know whether, as so often is the case, I was defeated by a 
convention unfamiliar to me, or whether the convention 
has really become formal and artificial. In any case, 
after the first shock of interest, I found the music monoto- 
nous. It was solemn and religious in character, and 
reminded me more of Gregorian chants than of anything 
else. But it had one curious feature which seemed rather 
to be primitive and orgiastic. The two musicians who 
played the drums accompanied the performers, almost 

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A "NO" DANCE 

unceasingly, by a kind of musical ejaculation, starting on 
a low note and swooping up to a high, long-held, falsetto 
cry. This over and over again, through the dialogue and 
through the singing. The object, I suppose, and perhaps 
to Japanese, the effect, is to sustain a high emotional tone. 
In my case it failed, as the music generally failed. My 
interest, as I began by saying, was maintained by the visual 
beauty; and that must have been very great to be able 
to maintain itself independently of the words and the 
music. 

As to the drama, it is not drama at all in the sense in 
which we have come to understand the term in the West. 
There is no " construction," no knot tied and untied, no 
character. Rather there is a succession of scenes selected 
from a well-known story for some quality of poignancy, 
or merely of narrative interest. The form, I think, should 
be called epic or lyric rather than dramatic. And it is 
in this point that it most obviously differs from the Greek 
drama. It has no intellectual content, or very little. 
And, perhaps for that reason, it has had no development, 
but remains fossilised where it was in the fifteenth century. 
On the other hand, these actors, I felt, are the only ones 
who could act Greek drama. They have, I think, quite 
clearly the same tradition and aim as the Greeks. They 
desire not to reproduce but to symbolise actuality; and 
their conception of acting is the very opposite of ours. 
The last thing they aim at is to be "natural." To be un- 
natural rather is their object. Hence the costume, 

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hence the mask, hence the movement and gesture. And 
how effective such " unnaturalness " can be in evoking 
natural passion only those will understand who have 
realised how ineffective for that purpose is our "natural- 
ness" when we are concerned with Sophocles or Shakspere. 
The Japanese have in their "No" dance a great treasure. 
For out of it they might, if they have the genius, develop 
a modern, poetic drama. How thankful would hundreds 
of young men be, starving for poetry in England, if we 
had as a living tradition anything analogous to work 
upon! 



\ 



[106) 









in 

NIKKO 

Waking in the night, I heard the sound of running water. 
Across my window I saw, stretching dimly, the branch 
of a pine, and behind it shone the stars. I remembered 
that I was in Japan and felt that all the essence of it was 
there. Running water, pine trees, sun and moon and 
stars. All their life, as all their art, seems to be a mood of 
these. For to them their life and their art are insepa- 
rable. The art is not an accomplishment, an ornament, 
an excrescence. It is the flower of the plant. Some men, 
some families of men, feeling beauty as every one felt it, 
had the power also to express it. Or perhaps I should 
say — it is the Japanese view — to suggest it. To them 
the branch of a tree stands for a forest, a white disc on 
gold for night and the moon, a quivering reed for a river, 
a bamboo stalk for a grove. Their painters are poets. 
By passionate observation they have learnt what ex- 
pression of the part most inevitably symbolises the whole. 
That they give; and their admirers, trained like them in 
feeling, fill in the rest. This art presupposes, what it has 
always had, a public not less sensitive than the artist; a 
similar mood, a similar tradition, a similar culture. Feel 

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as they do, and you must create as they do, or at least 
appreciate their creations. 

It was with this in my mind that I wandered about 
this exquisite place, where Man has made a lovely nature 
lovelier still. More even than by the famous and sump- 
tuous temples I was moved by the smaller and humbler 
shrines, so caressing are they of every choice spot, so 
expressive, not of princely, but of popular, feeling. Here 
is one, for instance, standing under a cliff beside a stream, 
where women offer bits of wood in the faith that so they 
will be helped to pass safely through the pangs of child- 
birth. Here in a ravine is another where men who want 
to develop their calves hang up sandals to a once athletic 
saint. "The Lord," our Scripture says, "delighteth 
not in any man's legs." How pleasant, then, it must be 
to have a saint who does! Especially for the Japanese, 
whose legs are so finely made, and who display them so 
delightfully. Such, all over the world, is the religion of 
the people, when they have any religion at all. And how 
human it is, and how much nearer to life than the austeri- 
ties and abstractions of a creed! 

Hour after hour I strolled through these lovely places, 
so beautifully ordered that the authorities, one feels, must 
themselves delight in the nature they control. I had proof 
of it, I thought, in a notice which ran as follows: 

"Famous Takino Temple stands not far away, and 
Somen Fall too. It is worth while to be there once." 

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! 



NIKKO 

It is indeed, and many times! But can you imagine 
a rural council in England breaking into this personal note? 
And how reserved! Almost like Japanese art. Compare 
the invitation I once saw in Switzerland, to visit "das 
schonste Schwann- und Aussichtspunkt des ganzen 
Schweitzerischen Reichs." There speaks the adver- 
tiser. But beside the Somen Fall there was no restau- 
rant. 

Northerners, and Anglo-Saxons in particular, have 
always at the back of their minds a notion that there is 
something effeminate about the sense for beauty. That is 
reserved for decadent Southern nations. Tu regere imperio 
populos, Romane memento they would say, if they knew the 
tag; and translate it " Britain rules the waves " ! But his- 
tory gives the he to this complacent theory. No nations 
were ever more virile than the Greeks or the Italians. 
They have left a mark on the world which will endure when 
Anglo-Saxon civilisation is forgotten. And none have been, 
or are, more virile than the Japanese. That they have the 
delicacy of women, too, does not alter the fact. The Rus- 
sian War proved it, if proof so tragic were required; and 
so does all their mediaeval history. Japanese feudalism was 
as bloody, as ruthless, as hard as European. It was even 
more gallant, stoical, loyal. But it had something else 
which I think Europe missed, unless it were once in Pro- 
vence. It had in the midst of its hardness a consciousness 
of the pathos of life, of its beauty, its brevity, its inex- 
plicable pain. I think in no other country has anything 

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arisen analogous to the Zen sect of Buddhism, when knights 
withdrew from battle to a garden and summerhouse, ex- 
quisitely ordered to symbolise the spiritual life, and there, 
over a cup of tea served with an elaborate ritual, looking 
out on a lovely nature, entered into mystic communion 
with the spirit of beauty which was also the spirit of life. 
From that communion, with that mood about them, they 
passed out to kill or to die — to die, it might be, by their 
own hand, by a process which I think no Western man can 
bear even to think of, much less conceive himself as 
imitating. 

This sense at once of the beauty and of the tragedy 
of life, this power of appreciating the one and dominating 
the other, seems to be the essence of the Japanese character. 
In this place, it will be remembered, is the tomb of Iyeyasu, 
the greatest statesman Japan has produced. Appro- 
priately, after his battles and his labours, he sleeps under 
the shade of trees, surrounded by chapels and oratories 
more sumptuous and superb than anything else in Japan, 
approached for miles and miles by a road lined on either 
side with giant cryptomerias. His spirit, if it could know, 
would appreciate, we may by sure, this habitation of 
beauty. For these men, ruthless as they were, were none 
the less sensitive . For example, the traveller is shown (in 
Kyoto, I think) a little pavilion in a garden where Hideyo- 
shi used to sit and contemplate the moon. I believe it. I 
think Iyeyasu did the same. And also he wrote this, on a 
roll here preserved: 

[no] 



NIKKO 

"Life is like unto a long journey with a heavy load. 
Let thy steps be slow and steady, that thou stumble not. 
Persuade thyself that privations are the natural lot of 
mortals, and there will be no room for discontent, neither 
for despair. When ambitious desires arise in thy heart, 
recall the days of extremity thou hast passed through. 
Forbearance is the root of quietness and assurance for ever. 
Look upon wrath as thy enemy. If thou knowest only 
what it is to conquer, and knowest not what it is to be 
defeated, woe unto thee! It will fare ill with thee. Find 
fault with thyself rather than with others. Better the less 
than the more." 

Marcus Aurelius might have said that. But Marcus 
Aurelius belonged to a race peculiarly insensitive to beauty. 
The Japanese stoics were also artists and poets. Their 
earliest painters were feudal lords, and it was feudal lords 
who fostered and acted the "No" dances. If Nietzsche 
had known Japan — I think he did not? — he would surely 
have found in these Daimyos and Samurai the forerunners 
of his Superman. A blood-red blossom growing out of the 
battlefield, that, I think, was his ideal. It is one which, I 
hope, the world has outlived. I look for the lily flowering 
over the fields of peace. 



[ml 



IV 

DIVINE RIGHT IN JAPAN 

When Japan was opened to the West, after more than 
two centuries of seclusion, she was in possession of a 
national spirit which had been enabled, by isolation, 
to become and remain simple and homogeneous. All 
public feeling, all public morals centred about the divinity 
of the Emperor; an idea which, by a process unique in 
history, had hibernated through centuries of political ob- 
scuration, and emerged again to the light with its prestige 
unimpaired in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 
the Emperor, one may say, Japan was incarnate. And to 
this faith the Japanese, as well as foreign observers, attrib- 
ute their great achievement in the Russian War. The 
little book of Captain Sakurai, Human Bullets, testifies to 
this fact in every sentence: "Through the abundant grace 
of Heaven and the illustrious virtue of his Majesty, the Im- 
perial forces defeated the great enemy both on land and 
sea." . . . "I jumped out of bed, cleansed my 
person with pure water, donned my best uniform, bowed 
to the East where the great Sire resides, solemnly 
read his proclamation of war, and told his Majesty 
that his humble subject was just starting to the front. 

[112] 



DIVINE RIGHT IN JAPAN 

When I offered my last prayers — the last I then 
believed they were — before the family shrine of my 
ancestors, I felt a thrill going all through me, as if they 
were giving me a solemn injunction saying: 'Thou 
art not thy own. For his Majesty's sake, thou shalt 
go to save the nation from calamity, ready to bear the 
crushing of thy bones and the tearing of thy flesh. Dis- 
grace not thy ancestors by an act of cowardice.' " This, 
it is clear, is an attitude quite different from that of an 
Englishman towards the King. The King, to us, is at most 
a symbol. The Emperor, to the Japanese, is, or was, a god. 
And the difference may be noted in small matters. For 
instance, a Japanese, writing from England, observes with 
astonishment that we put the head of the King on our 
stamps and cover it with postmarks. That, to a Japanese, 
seems to be blasphemy. Again, he is puzzled, at the Coro- 
nation in Westminster Abbey, to find the people looking 
down from above on the King. That, again, seems to him 
blasphemy. Last year, when the Emperor was dying, 
crowds knelt hour after hour, day and night, on the road 
beside the palace praying for him. And a photographer 
who took a picture of them by flashlight was literally torn 
to pieces. One could multiply examples, but the thing 
is plain. The national spirit of Japan centres about the 
divinity of the Emperor. And precisely therein lies their 
present problem. For one may say, I think, with confidence, 
that this attitude cannot endure, and is already disappear- 
ing. Western thought is an irresistible solvent of all irra- 

[113] 



APPEARANCES 

tlonal and instinctive ideas. Men cannot be engineers and 
pathologists and at the same time believe that a man is a 
god. They cannot be historians and at the same time be- 
lieve that their first Emperor came down from heaven. 
Above all, they cannot be politicians and abstain from an- 
alysing the real source and sanction of political power. 
English political experience, it is true, suggests immense 
possibilities in the way of clinging to fictions with the feeK 
ings while insisting upon facts in practice. And the famous 
verse: 

" But I was thinking of a plan 
To dye my whiskers green, 
And always wear so large a fan 
That they should not be seen," 

might have been written to summarise the development of 
the British Constitution. But the success of that method 
depends upon the condition that the fictions shall be 
nothing but fictions. The feelings of the English can centre 
about the King only because they are well assured that he 
does not and will not govern. But that condition does 
not exist in Japan. The Japanese Constitution is con- 
ceived on the German, not the English model; and it 
bristles with clauses which are intended to prevent the 
development which has taken place in England — the shift- 
ing of power from the Sovereign to a Parliamentary ma- 
jority. The Ministers are the Emperor's Ministers; the 
policy is the Emperor's policy. That is the whole tenor 

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DIVINE RIGHT IN JAPAN 

of the Constitution. No Constitution, it is true, can 
"trammel up" facts and put power anywhere but where 
nature puts it. If an Emperor is not a strong man he will 
not govern, and his Ministers will. And it seems to be 
well understood among Japanese politicians that the per- 
sonal will of the Emperor does not, in fact, count for very 
much. But it is supposed to; and that must become an 
important point so soon as conflict develops between the 
Parliament and the Government. And such conflict is 
bound to arise, and is already arising. Japanese parties, 
it is true, stand for persons rather than principles; and the 
real governing power hitherto has been a body quite un- 
known to the Constitution — namely, the group of "Elder 
Statesmen." But there are signs that this group is disin- 
tegrating, and that its members are beginning to recognise 
the practical necessity of forming and depending upon a 
party in the country and the House of Representatives. 
The crisis which led, the other day, to the fall of Prince 
Katsura was provoked by popular tumults; and it was 
noticeable that, for the first time, the name of the Em- 
peror was introduced into political controversy. It seems 
clear that in the near future either the Emperor must 
appear openly as a fighting force, as the German Emperor 
does, or he must subside into a figurehead and the gov- 
ernment pass into the hands of Parliament. The former 
alternative is quite incompatible with the idea of the god- 
king; the latter might not be repugnant to it if other 
things tender to foster it. But it is so clear that they do 

[115] 



APPEARANCES 

not! An Emperor who is titular head of a Parliamentary 
Government might, and in Japan no doubt would, be sur- 
rounded with affection and respect. He could never be 
seriously regarded as divine. For that whole notion be- 
longs to an age innocent of all that is implied in the very 
possibility of Parliamentary government. It belongs to 
the age of mythology and poetry, not to the age of reason. 
Japanese patriotism in the future must depend on love of 
country, unsupported by the once powerful sanction of a 
divine personality. 

If this be true, I question very much the wisdom of 
that part of the Japanese educational system which en- 
deavours to centre all duty about the person of the Em- 
peror. The Japanese are trying a great experiment in 
State-imposed morality — a policy highly questionable at 
the best, but becoming almost demonstrably absurd when 
it is based on an idea which is foredoomed to discredit. 
The well-known Imperial rescript, which is kept framed 
in -every school, reads as follows: 

"Our Ancestors founded the State on a vast basis, and 
deeply implanted virtue; and Our subjects, by their 
unanimity in their great loyalty and filial affection, have 
in all ages shown these qualities in perfection. Such is the 
essential beauty of Our national polity, and such, too, is 
the true spring of Our educational system. You, Our be- 
loved subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your 
brothers, be loving husbands and wives, and truthful to 

[116] 



DIVINE RIGHT IN JAPAN 

your friends. Conduct yourselves with modesty, and be 
benevolent to all. Develop your intellectual faculties and 
perfect your moral power by gaining knowledge and by 
acquiring a profession. Further, promote the public in- 
terest and advance the public affairs; and in case of emer- 
gency, courageously sacrifice yourself to the public good. 
Thus offer every support to Our Imperial Dynasty, which 
shall be as lasting as the Universe. You will then not only 
be Our most loyal subjects, but will be enabled to exhibit 
the noble character of your ancestors. 

"Such are the testaments left us by Our Ancestors, 
which must be observed alike by their descendants and 
subjects. These precepts are perfect throughout all ages 
and of universal application. It is Our desire to bear 
them in Our heart, in common with you Our subjects, to 
the end that we may constantly possess their virtues." 

This rescript may be read with admiration. But com- 
mon sense would teach every Westerner that a document 
so framed is at variance with the whole bent of the modern 
mind, and, if forced upon it, could only goad it into re- 
bellion. And such, I have been informed, and easily be- 
lieve, is the effect it is beginning to have in Japan. Young 
people brought up on Western languages and Western 
science demand a Western, that is a rational, sanction for 
conduct. They do not believe the Emperor to be divine, 
and therefore they cannot take their moral principles on 
trust from him and from his ancestors. The violent re- 

[."7] 



APPEARANCES 

action from this State-imposed doctrine drives them in- 
to sheer scepticism and anarchy. And here, as always 
throughout history, authority defeats its own purposes. 
Western ideas cannot be taken in part. They cannot be 
applied to the natural world and fenced off from the moral 
world. Japan must go through the same crisis through 
which the West is passing; she must revise the whole basis 
of her traditional morals. And in doing so she must be 
content to lose that passionate and simple devotion which 
is the good as well as the evil product of an age of uncritical 
faith. 



[118] 



FUJI 

It was raining when we reached Gotemba and took off our 
boots at the entrance. of the inn. I had never before 
stayed at a Japanese inn, and this one, so my friend as- 
sured me, was a bad specimen of the class. Certainly it 
was disorderly and dirty. It was also overcrowded. But 
that was inevitable, for a thousand pilgrims in a day were 
landing at Gotemba station. Men and women, young 
and old, grandparents, parents, children come flocking in 
to climb the great mountain. The village street is lined 
with inns; and in front of each stood a boy with a lantern 
hailing the new arrivals. We were able, in spite of the 
crowd, to secure a room to ourselves, and even, with 
difficulty, some water to wash in — too many people had 
used and were using the one bath! A table and a chair 
were provided for the foreigner, and very uncouth they 
looked in the pretty Japanese room. But a bed was out 
of the question. One had to sleep on the floor among 
the fleas. Certainly it was not comfortable; but it was 
amusing. From my room in the upper story I looked 
into the whole row of rooms in the inn opposite, thrown 
open to the street, with their screens drawn back. One 

[119] 



APPEARANCES 

saw families and parties, a dozen or more in a room, dress- 
ing and undressing, naked and clothed, sleeping, eating 
talking; all, of course, squatting on the floor, with a low 
stool for a table, and red-lacquered bowls for plates and 
dishes. How people manage to eat rice with chop-sticks 
will always be a mystery to me. For my own part, I 
cannot even — but I will not open that humiliating 
chapter. 

Of the night, the less said the better. I rose with relief, 
but dressed with embarrassment; for the girl who waited 
on us selected the moment of my toilet to clean the room. 
It was still raining hard, and we had decided to abandon 
our expedition, for another night in that inn was unthink- 
able. But, about eleven, a gleam of sun encouraged us 
to proceed, and we started on horseback for the mountain. 
And here I must note that by the official tariff, approved 
by the police, a foreigner is charged twice as much for a 
horse as a Japanese. If one asks why, one is calmly in- 
formed that a foreigner, as a rule, is heavier! This is 
typical of travel in Japan; and there have been moments 
when I have sympathised with the Californians in their 
discrimination against the Japanese. Those moments, 
however, are rare and brief, and speedily repented of. 

Naturally, as soon as we had started the weather clouded 
over again. We rode for three hours at a foot-pace, and 
by the time we left our horses and began the ascent on 
foot we were wrapped in thick, cold mist. There is no 
difficulty about climbing Fuji, except the fatigue. You 

[120] 



FUJI 

simply walk for hours up a steep and ever-steeper heap 
of ashes. It was perhaps as well that we did not see what 
lay before us, or we might have been discouraged. We 
saw nothing but the white-grey mist and the purple-grey 
soil. Except that, looming out of the cloud just in front 
of us, there kept appearing and vanishing a long line of 
pilgrims, with peaked hats, capes, and sandals, all made of 
straw, winding along with their staffs, forty at least, 
keeping step, like figures in a frieze, like shadows on a sheet, 
like spirits on the mountain of Purgatory, like anything 
but solid men walking up a hill. So for hours we laboured 
on, the slope becoming steeper every step, till we could go 
no further, and stopped at a shelter to pass the night. 
Here we were lucky. The other climbers had halted below 
or above, and we had the long, roomy shed to ourselves. 
Blankets, a fire of wood, and a good meal restored us. 
We sat warming and congratulating ourselves, when sud- 
denly our guide at the door gave a cry. We hurried to 
see. And what a sight it was! The clouds lay below us 
and a starlit sky above. At our feet the mountain fell 
away like a cliff, but it fell rather to a glacier than a sea — 
a glacier infinite as the ocean, yawning in crevasses, bil- 
lowing in ridges; a glacier not of ice, but of vapour, chang- 
ing form as one watched, opening here, closing there, ris- 
ing, falling, shifting, while far away, at the uttermost 
verge, appeared a crimson crescent, then a red oval, then a 
yellow globe, swimming up above the clouds, touching 
their lights with gold, deepening their shadows, and spread- 

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APPEARANCES 

ing, where it rose, a lake of silver fire over the surface of 
the tossing plain. 

We looked till it was too cold to look longer, then 
wrapped ourselves in quilts and went to sleep. At mid- 
night I woke. Outside there was a strange moaning. 
The wind had risen; and the sound of it in that lonely 
place gave me a shock of fear. The mountain, then, 
was more than a heap of dead ashes. Presences haunted 
it; powers indifferent to human fate. That wind had 
blown before man came into being, and would blow when 
he had ceased to exist. It moaned and roared. Then 
it was still. But I could not sleep again, and lay watch- 
ing the flicker of the lamp on the long wooden roof, and 
the streaks of moonlight through the chinks, till the coolie 
lit a fire and called us to get up. We started at four. 
The clouds were still below, and the moon above; but 
she had moved across to the west, Orion had appeared, 
and a new planet blazed in the east. The last climb was 
very steep and our breath very scant. But we had other 
things than that to think of. Through a rift in a cloud 
to the eastward dawned a salmon-coloured glow; it bright- 
ened to fire; lit up the clouds above and the clouds below; 
blazed more and intolerably, till, as we reached the summit, 
the sxm leapt into view and sent a long line of light down 
the tumultuous sea of rolling cloud. 

How cold it was! And what an atmosphere inside 
the highest shelter, where sleepers had been packed like 
sardines and the newly kindled fire filled the fetid air 

'[122] 



FUJI 

with acrid smoke! What there was to be seen we saw 
— the crater, neither wide nor deep; the Shinto temple, 
where a priest was intoning prayers; and the Post Office, 
where an enterprising Government sells picture-postcards 
for triumphant pilgrims to despatch to their friends. My 
friend must have written at least a dozen, while I waited 
and shivered with numbed feet and hands. But after 
an hour we began the descent, and quickly reached the 
shelter where we were to breakfast. Thence we had to 
plunge again into the clouds. But before doing so we took 
a long look at the marvellous scene — more marvellous 
than any view of earth; icebergs tossing in a sea, mountains 
exhaling and vanishing, magic castles and palaces tower- 
ing across infinite space. A step, and once more the white- 
grey mist and the purple-grey soil. But the clouds had 
moved higher; and it was not long before we saw, to the 
south, cliffs and the sea, to the east, the gleam of green 
fields, running up, under cloud-shadows, to mountain 
ridges and peaks. And so back to Gotemba, and our now 
odious inn. 

We would not stop there. So we parted, my friend 
for Tokio, I for Kyoto. But time-tables had been fal- 
lacious, and I found myself landed at Numatsa, with 
four hours to wait for the night train, no comfort in the 
waiting-room, and no Japanese words at my command. 
I understood then a little better why foreigners are so 
offensive in the East. They do not know the language; 
they find themselves impotent where their instinct is 

[123] 



APPEARANCES 

to domineer; and they visit on the Oriental the ill-temper 
which is really produced by their own incompetence. 
Yes, I must confess that I had to remind myself severely 
that it was I, and not the Japanese, who was stupid. At 
last the station-master came to my rescue — the station- 
master always speaks English. He endured my petulance 
with the unfailing courtesy and patience of his race, and 
sent me off at last in a rickshaw to the beach, and a 
Japanese hotel. But my troubles were not ended. I 
reached the hotel; I bowed and smiled to the group of 
kow-towing girls; but how to tell them that I wanted a 
bath and a meal? Signs were unavailing. We looked 
at one another and laughed, but that did not help. At 
last they sent for a student who knew a little English. 
I could have hugged him. "It is a great pity," he said, 
"that these people do not know English." The pity, I 
replied, was that I did not know Japanese, but his courtesy 
repudiated the suggestion. Could I have a bathing 
costume? Of course! And in a quarter of an hour 
he brought me a wet one. Where could I change? He 
showed me a room; and presently I was swimming in the 
sea, with such delight as he only can know who has 
ascended and descended Fuji without the chance of a 
bath. Returning to the inn, I wandered about in my wet 
costume seeking vainly the room in which I had changed. 
Laughing girls pushed me here, and pulled me there, 
uncomprehending of my pantomime, till one at last, 
quicker than the rest, pulled back a slide, and revealed 

[124] 



FUJI 

the room I was seeking. Then came dinner — soup, 
fried fish, and rice; and — for my weakness — a spoon and 
fork to eat them with. The whole house seemed to 
be open, and one looked into every room, watching the 
ways of these gay and charming people. At last I paid 
— to accomplish that by pantomime was easy, — and 
said good-bye to my hostess and her maids, who bowed 
their heads to the ground and smiled as though I had been 
the most honoured of guests instead of a clumsy foreigner, 
fit food for mirth. A walk in a twilight pine wood, and 
then back to the station, where I boarded the night train, 
and slept fitfully until five, when we reached Kyoto, and 
my wanderings were over. How I enjoyed the comfort 
of the best hotel in the East! But also how I regretted 
that I had not long ago learnt to find comfort in the far 
more beautiful manner of life of Japan ! 



[125] 



VI 

JAPAN AND AMERICA 

On the reasons, real or alleged, for the hostility of the 
Californians to the Japanese this is not the place to dwell. 
At bottom, it is a conflict of civilisations, a conflict which 
is largely due to ignorance and misunderstanding, and 
which should never be allowed to develop into avowed 
antagonism. For with time, patience, and sympathy it 
will disappear of itself. The patience and sympathy, I 
think, are not lacking on the side of the Japanese, but they 
are sadly lacking among the Californians, and indeed 
among all white men in Western America. The truth is 
that the Western pioneer knows nothing of Japan and 
wants to know nothing. And he would be much aston- 
ished, not to say indignant, were he told that the civilisa- 
tion of Japan is higher than that of America. Yet there 
can, I think, be no doubt that this is the case, if real values 
be taken as a standard. America, and the " new " coun- 
tries generally, have contributed, so far, nothing to the 
world except material prosperity. I do not under-esti- 
mate this. It is a great thing to have subdued a con- 
tinent. And it may be argued that those who are engaged 
in this task have no energy to spare for other activities. 

[126] 



JAPAN AND AMERICA 

But the Japanese subdued their island centuries, even 
millenniums, ago. And, having reduced it to as high 
a state of culture as they required, they began to live 
— a thing the new countries have not yet attempted. 

To live, in the sense in which I am using the term, 
implies that you reflect life in the forms of art, litera- 
ture, philosophy, and religion. To all these things the 
Japanese have made notable contributions; less notable, 
indeed, than those of China, from whom they derived 
their inspiration, but still native, genuine, and precious. 
To take first bare externals, the physical life of the Japanese 
is beautiful. I read with amazement the other day a 
quotation from a leading Californian newspaper to the 
effect that " there is an instinctive sense of physical re- 
pugnance on the part of the Western or European races 
towards the Japanese race"! Had the writer, I wonder, 
ever been in Japan? Perhaps it would have made no 
difference to him if he had, for he is evidently one of those 
who cannot or will not see. But to me the first and 
chief impression of Japan is the physical attractiveness 
of the people. The Japanese are perfectly proportioned; 
their joints, their hands, their feet, their hips, are elegant 
and fine; and they display to the best advantage these 
natural graces by a costume which is as beautiful as it is 
simple. To see these perfect figures walking, running, 
mounting stairs, bathing, even pulling rickshaws, is to 
receive a constant stream of shocks of surprise and delight. 
In so much that, after some weeks in the country, I begin 

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to feel " a sense of physical repugnance " to Americans 
and Europeans — a sense which, if I were as uneducated 
and inexperienced as the writer in the Argonaut, I should 
call " instinctive/ ■ and make the basis of a campaign of 
race-hatred. The misfortune is that the Japanese abandon 
their own dress when they go abroad. And in European 
dress, which they do not understand, and which conceals 
their bodies, they are apt to look mean and vulgar. Simi- 
larly, in European dress, they lose their own perfect man- 
ners and mis-acquire the worst of the West. So that 
there may be some excuse for feeling " repugnance " to 
the Japanese abroad, though, of course, it is merely absurd 
and barbarous to base upon such superficial distaste a 
policy of persecution and insult. 

If we turn from the body to the mind and the spirit, 
the Japanese show themselves in no respect inferior, 
and in some important respects superior, to the Ameri- 
cans. New though they are to the whole mental attitude 
which underlies science and its applications, they have 
already, in half a century, produced physicians, surgeons, 
pathologists, engineers who can hold their own with the 
best of Europe and America. All that the West can do 
in this, its own special sphere, the Japanese, late-comers 
though they be, are showing that they can do, too. In 
particular, to apply the only test which the Western 
nations seem really to accept, they can build ships, train 
men, organise a campaign, and beat a great Western 
Power at the West's own game of slaughter. But all 

[128] 



JAPAN AND AMERICA 

this, of science and armaments, big though it bulks in 
our imagination, is secondary and subordinate in a true 
estimate of civilisation. The great claim the Japanese 
may make, as I began by saying, is that they have known 
how to live; and they have proved that by the only test 
— by the way they have reflected life. 

Japanese literature and art may not be as great as 
that of Europe; but it exists, whereas that of America 
and all the new countries is yet to seek. While Europe 
was still plunged in the darkest of the Dark Ages, Japanese 
poets were already producing songs in exquisite response 
to the beauty of nature, the passion and pathos of human 
life. From the seventh century on, their painting and 
their sculpture were reflecting in tender and gracious forms 
the mysteries of their faith. Their literature and their 
art changed its content and its form with the centuries, 
but it continued without a break, in a stream of genuine 
inspiration, down to the time when the West forced open 
the doors of Japan to the world. From that moment, 
under the new influences, it has sickened and declined. 
But what a record! And a record that is also an incon- 
trovertible proof that the Japanese belong to the civilised 
nations — the nations that can live and express life. 

But perhaps this test may be rejected. Morals, it may 
be urged, is the touchstone of civilisation, not art. Well, 
take morals. The question is a large one; but, summarily, 
where do the Japanese fail, as compared with the Western 
nations? Is patriotism the standard? In this respect 

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APPEARANCES 

what nation can compete with them? Is it courage? 
What people are braver? Is it industry? Who is more 
industrious? It is their very industry that has aroused 
the jealous fears of the Californians. Is it family life? 
Where, outside the East, is found such solidarity as in 
Japan? Is it sexual purity? On that point, what Wes- 
tern nation can hold up its head? Is it honesty? What of 
the honesty of the West? No; no Westerner, knowing 
the facts, could for a moment maintain that, all round and 
on the whole, the morals of the Japanese are inferior to 
those of Europe or America. It would probably be easier 
to maintain the opposite. Judged by every real test the 
Japanese civilisation is not lower, it is higher than that 
>^f any of the new countries who refuse to permit the 
Japanese to live among them. 

That, I admit, does not settle the question. Competent 
and impartial men like Admiral Mahan, who would admit 
all that I have urged, still maintain that the Japanese 
ought not to be allowed to settle in the West. This con- 
clusion I do not now discuss. The point I wish to make 
is that the question can never be fairly faced, in a dry 
light, and with reference only to the simple facts, until 
the prejudice is broken up and destroyed that the Japanese, 
and all other Orientals, are "inferior" races. It is this 
prejudice which distorts all the facts and all the values, 
which makes Californians and British Columbians and 
Australians sheerly unreasonable, and causes them to 
jump at one argument after another, each more fallacious 

[130] 



JAPAN AND AMERICA 

than the last, to defend an attitude which at bottom is 
nothing but the childish and ignorant hatred of the un- 
cultivated man for everything strange. If the Japanese 
had had white skins, should we ever have heard of the 
economic argument? And should we ever have been 
presented with that new shibboleth "unassimilable"? 



I m] 



VII 

HOME 

Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London! What a crescendo of 
life! What a quickening of the flow! What a gathering 
intensity! "Whatever else we may think of the West," 
I said to the young French artist, "it is, at any rate, the 
centre of life.^ "Yes," he replied, "but the curious thing 
is that that Life produces only Death. Dead things, and 
dead people." I reflected. Yes! The things certainly 
were dead. Look at the Louvre ! Look at the Madeleine ! 
Look at any of the streets ! Machine-men had made it all, 
not human souls. The men were dead, then, too? " Cer- 
tainly!" he insisted. "Their works are a proof. Where 
there is life there is art. And there is no art in the modern 
world — neither in the East nor in the West." "Then 
what is this that looks like Life?" I said, looking at the 
roaring streets. He shrugged his shoulders and said, 
"Steam." 

With that in my mind, I crossed to England, and forgot 
criticism and speculation in the gleam of the white cliffs, 
in the trim hedgerows and fields, in the sound of English 
voices and the sight of English faces. In London it was 
the same. The bright-cheeked messenger boys, the dis- 

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HOME 

creetly swaggering chauffeurs, the quiet, competent young 
men in City offices who reassured me about my baggage, 
the autumn sun on the maze of misty streets, the vast 
picturesqueness of London, its beauty as of a mountain 
or the sea, fairly carried me off my feet. And passing St. 
Paul's — "Dead," I muttered, as I looked at its derivative 
facade, — I went in to take breath. From the end of the 
vast, cold space came the dreary wail I remembered so 
well. I had heard Church music at Moscow, and knew 
what it ought to be. But the tremendous passion of that 
Eastern plain-song, would have offended these discreet 
walls. I was in a "sacred edifice"; and with a pang of 
regret I recalled the wooden shrines of Japan under the 
great trees, the solemn Buddhas, and the crowds of cheer- 
ful worshippers. I walked down the empty nave and 
came under the dome. Then something happened — the 
thing that always happens when one comes into touch 
with the work of a genius. And Wren's dome proves that 
he was that. I sat down, and the organ began to play; 
or rather, the dome began to sing. And down the stream 
of music floated in fragments visions of my journey — 
Indians nude like bronzes, blue-coated Chinese, white 
robes and bare limbs from Japan, plains of corn, plains of 
rice, plains of scorched grass; snow-peaks under the stars, 
volcanoes, green and black; huge rivers, tumbling streams, 
waterfalls, lakes, the ocean; hovels and huts of wood or 
sun-dried bricks, thatched or tiled; marble palaces and 
baths; red lacquer, golden tiles; saints, kings, conquerors, 

[i33] 



APPEARANCES 

and, enduring or worshipping these, a myriad generations 
of peasants through long millenniums, toiling, suffering, 
believing, in one unchanging course of life, before the 
dawn of history on and down to here and now. As they 
were, so they are; and I heard them sound as with the 
drone of Oriental music. Then above that drone some- 
thing new appeared. Late in time, Western history 
emerged, and — astonishing thing — began to move and 
change! "Why," I said, " there's something trying to 
happen! What is it? Is there going to be a melody?" 
There was not one. But there was — has the reader ever 
heard the second — or is it the third? — overture to 
"Leonora"? A scale begins to run up, first on the violins; 
then one by one the other instruments join in, till the 
great basses are swept into the current and run and scale, 
too. So it was here. The West began; but the East 
caught it up. The unchanging drone began to move and 
flow. Faster and faster, louder and louder, more and 
more intensely, crying and flaming towards — what? 
Beethoven knew, and put it into his music. We cannot 
put it into ideas or words. We can see the problem, not 
the solution; and the problem is this: To reconcile the 
Western flight down Time with the Eastern rest in Eter- 
nity; the Western multiformity with the Eastern identity; 
the Western energy with the Eastern peace. For God is 
neither Time nor Eternity, but Time in Eternity; neither 
One nor Many, but One in Many; neither Spirit nor 
Matter, but Matter-Spirit. That the great artists know, 

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HOME 

and the great saints; the modern artists and the modern 
saints, who have been or who will be. Goethe was one; 
Beethoven was one; and there will be greater, when the 
contact between East and West becomes closer, and the 
sparks from pole to pole fly faster. 

I had dropped into mere thinking, and realised that the 
organ had stopped. I left the great church and came out 
upon the back of Queen Anne, which made me laugh. 
Still, it was quite religious; so were the 'buses, and the 
motor-cars, and the shops and offices, and the Law Courts, 
and the top-hats, and the crossing-sweepers. "Dear 
people, ,, I said, "you are not dead, any more than I am. 
You think you are, as I, too, often do. When you feel 
dead you should go to church; but not in a 'sacred edifice/ 
Beethoven, even in the Queen's Hall, is better." 



[135] 



\ 



PART IV 
AMERICA 



\ 



THE "DIVINE AVERAGE" 

The great countries of the East have each a civilisation 
that is original, if not independent. India, China, Japan, 
each has a peculiar outlook on the world. Not so America, 
at any rate in the north. America, we might say, does 
not exist; there exists instead an offshoot of Europe. Nor 
does an "American spirit ,, exist; there exists instead the 
spirit of the average Western man. Americans are immi- 
grants and descendants of immigrants. Putting aside 
the negroes and a handful of Orientals, there is nothing to 
be found here that is not to be found in Western Europe; 
only here what thrives is not what is distinctive of the 
different European countries, but what is common to them 
all. What America does, not, of course, in a moment, 
but with incredible rapidity, is to obliterate distinctions. 
The Scotchman, the Irishman, the German, the Scandi- 
navian, the Italian, even, I suppose, the Czech, drops his 
costume, his manner, his language, his traditions, his 
beliefs, and retains only his common Western humanity. 
Transported to this continent all the varieties developed 
in Europe revert to the original type, and flourish in un- 
exampled vigour and force. It is not a new type that 

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APPEARANCES 

is evolved; it is the fundamental type, growing in a new 
soil, in luxuriant profusion. ^Describe the average Western 
man and you describe the American; from east to west, 
from north to south, everywhere and always the same 
— masterful, aggressive, unscrupulous, egotistic, at once 
good-natured and brutal, kind if you do not cross him, 
ruthless if you do, greedy, ambitious, self-reliant, active 
for the sake of activity, intelligent and unintellectual, 
quick-witted and crass, contemptuous of ideas but amorous 
of devices, valuing nothing but success, recognising nothing 
but the actual, Man in the concrete, undisturbed by spirit- 
ual life, the master of methods and slave of things, and 
therefore the conqueror of the world, the unquestioning, 
the undoubting, the child with the muscles of a man, the 
European stripped bare, and shown for what he is, a preda- 
tory, unreflecting, naifl precociously accomplished brute. 

One does not then find in America anything one does 
not find in Europe; but one finds in Europe what one does 
not find in America. One finds, as well as the average, 
what is below and what is above it. America has, broadly 
speaking, no waste products. The wreckage, everywhere 
evident in Europe, is not evident there. Men do not 
lose their self-respect, they win it; they do not drop out, 
they work in. This is the great result not of American 
institutions or ideas, but of American opportunities. It 
is the poor immigrant who ought to sing the praises of this 
continent. He alone has the proper point of view; and 
lie, unfortunately, is dumb. But often, when I have con* 

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THE " DIVINE AVERAGE" 

templated with dreary disgust, in the outskirts of New 
York, the hideous, wooden shanties planted askew in 
wastes of garbage, and remembered Naples or Genoa or 
Venice, suddenly it has been borne in upon me that the 
Italians living there feel that they have their feet on the 
ladder leading to paradise; that for the first time they 
have before them a prospect and a hope; and that while 
they have lost, or are losing, their manners, their beauty, 
and their charm, they have gained something which, in 
their eyes, and perhaps in reality, more than compensates 
for losses they do not seem to feel, they have gained self- 
respect, independence, and the allure of the open horizon. 
"The vision of America," a friend writes, "is the vision 
of the lifting up of the millions." This, I believe, is true, 
and it is America's great contribution to civilisation. I 
do not forget it; but neither shall I dwell upon it; for 
though it is, I suppose, the most important thing about 
America, it is not what I come across in my own experience. 
What strikes more often and more directly home to me is 
the other fact that America, if she is not burdened by 
masses lying below the average, is also not inspired by 
an elite rising above it. Her distinction is the absence of 
distinction. No wonder Walt Whitman sang the "Divine 
Average." There was nothing else in America for him 
to sing. But he should not have called it divine; he should 
have called it "human, all too human." 

Or is it divine? Divine somehow in its potenti- 
alities? Divine to a deeper vision than mine? I was 

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APPEARANCES 

writing this at Brooklyn, in a room that looks across 
the East River to New York. And after putting down 
those words, " human, all too human," I stepped out on 
to the terrace. Across the gulf before me went shooting 
forward and back interminable rows of fiery shuttles; 
and on its surface seemed to float blazing basilicas. Be* 
yond rose into the darkness a dazzling tower of light, 
dusking and shimmering, primrose and green, up to a 
diadem of gold. About it hung galaxies and constel- 
lations, outshining the firmament of stars; and all the 
air was full of strange voices, more than human, ingemi- 
nating Babylonian oracles out of the bosom of night. 
This is New York. This it is that the average man 
has done, he knows not why; this is the symbol of his 
work, so much more than himself, so much more than 
what seems to be itself in the common light of day. 
America does not know what she is doing, neither do 
I know, nor any man. But the impulse that drives 
her, so mean and poor to the critic's eye, has perhaps 
more significance in the eye of God; and the optimism 
of this continent, so seeming-frivolous, is justified, may 
be, by reason lying beyond its ken. 



[142] 



II 

A CONTINENT OF PIONEERS 

The American, I said, in the previous letter, is the aver- 
age Western man. It should be added, he is the average 
man in the guise of pioneer. Much that surprises or 
shocks Europeans in the American character is to be 
explained, I believe, by this fact. Among pioneers 
the individual is everything and the society nothing. 
Every man relies on himself and on his personal rela- 
tions. He is a friend, and an enemy; he is never a citizen. 
Justice, order, respect for law, honesty even and honour 
are to him mere abstract names; what is real is intelligence 
and force, the service done or the injury inflicted, the 
direct emotional reaction to persons and deeds. And 
still, as it seems to the foreign observer, even in the long- 
settled East, still more in the West, this attitude prevails. 
To the American politician or business man, that a thing 
is right or wrong, legal or illegal, seems a pale and irrelevant 
consideration. The real question is, will it pay? will it 
please Theophilus P. Polk or vex Harriman Q. Kunz? If 
it is illegal, will it be detected? If detected, will it be 
prosecuted? What are our resources for evading or 
defeating the law? And all this with good temper and 

[i43l 



APPEARANCES 

good conscience. What stands in the way, says the 
pioneer, must be swept out of it; no matter whether it 
be the moral or the civil law, a public authority or a rival 
in business. " The strong business man" has no use for 
scruples. Public or social considerations do not appeal 
to him. Or if they do present themselves, he satisfies 
himself with the belief that, from activities so strenuous 
and remarkable as his, Good must result to the com- 
munity. If he break the law, that is the fault of the 
law, for being stupid and obstructive; if he break indi- 
viduals, that is their fault for being weak. Vae metis 
Never has that principle, or rather instinct, ruled more 
paramount than it does in America. 

To say this, is to say that American society is the 
most individualistic in the modern world. This follows 
naturally from the whole situation of the country. The 
pioneer has no object save to get rich; the government of 
pioneers has no object save to develop the country quickly. 
To this object everything is sacrificed, including the 
interests of future generations. All new countries have 
taken the most obvious and easy course. They have 
given away for nothing, or for a song, the whole of their 
natural resources to anybody who will undertake to exploit 
them. And those who have appropriated this wealth 
have judged it to be theirs by a kind of natural right. 
" These farms, mines, forests, oilsprings — of course they 
are ours. Did not we discover them? Did not we squat 
upon them? Have we not ' mixed our labour with them'? " 

[i44] 



A CONTINENT OF PIONEERS 

If pressed as to the claims of later-comers they would 
probably reply that there remains " as much and as 
good" for others. And this of course is true for a time; 
but for a very short time, even when it is a continent that 
is being divided up. Practically the whole territory of 
the United States is now in private ownership. Still, 
the owners have made such good use of their opportuni- 
ties that they have created innumerable opportunities for 
non-owners. Artisans get good wages; lawyers make 
fortunes; stock and share holders get high dividends. 
Every one feels that he is flourishing, and flourishing by 
his own efforts. He has no need to combine with his 
fellows; or, if he does combine, is ready to desert them in a 
moment when he sees his own individual chance. 

But this is only a phase; and inevitably, by the logic 
of events, there supervenes upon it another on which, it 
would appear, America is just now entering. With all 
her natural resources distributed among individuals or 
corporations, and with the tide of immigration unchecked, 
she begins to feel the first stress of the situation of which 
the tension in Europe has already become almost intol- 
erable. It is the situation which cannot fail to result 
from the system of private property and inheritance 
established throughout the Western world. Opportunities 
diminish, classes segregate. There arises a caste of wage- 
earners never to be anything but wage-earners; a caste of 
property-owners, handing on their property to their 
descendants; and substantially, after all deductions have 

[i4Sl 



APPEARANCES 

been made for exaggeration and simplification, a division 
of society into capitalists and proletarians. American 
society is beginning to crystallise out into the forms of 
European society. For, once more, America is nothing 
new; she is a repetition of the old on a larger scale. And, 
curiously, she is less " new " than the other new countries. 
Australia and New Zealand for years past have been 
trying experiments in social policy; they are determined 
to do what they can to prevent the recurrence there of the 
European situation. But in America there is no sign 
of such tendencies. The political and social philosophy 
of the United States is still that of the early English 
individualists. And, no doubt, there are adequate causes, 
if not good reasons for this. The immense wealth and 
size of the country, the huge agricultural population, the 
proportionally smaller aggregation in cities has maintained 
in the mass of the people what I have called the "pioneer " 
attitude. Opportunity has been, and still is, more open 
than in any other country; and, in consequence, there has 
hardly emerged a definite "working class" with a class 
consciousness. This, however, is a condition that can- 
not be expected to continue. America will develop 
on the lines of Europe, because she has European insti- 
tutions; and "labour" will assert itself more and more as 
an independent factor in politics. 

Whether it will assert itself successfully is another 
matter. At present, as is notorious, American politics 
are controlled by wealth, more completely, perhaps, than 

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A CONTINENT OF PIONEERS 

those of any other country, even of England. The "cor- 
porations " make it a main part of their business to cap- 
ture Congress, the Legislatures, the Courts, and the city 
governments; and they are eminently successful. The 
smallest country town has its "boss," in the employ of the 
Railway; the Public Service Corporations control the 
cities; and the protected interests dominate the Senate. 
Business governs America; and business does not include 
labour. In no civilised country except Japan is labour- 
legislation so undeveloped as in the States; in none is 
capital so uncontrolled; in none is justice so openly pros- 
tituted to wealth. America is the paradise of plutocracy ; 
for the rich there enjoy not only a real power but a social 
prestige such as can hardly have been accorded to them 
even in the worst days of the Roman Empire. Great 
fortunes and their owners are regarded with a respect as 
naif and as intense as has ever been conceded to birth 
in Europe. No American youth of ambition, I am told, 
leaves college with any less or greater purpose in his heart 
than that of emulating Mr. Carnegie or Mr. Rockefeller. 
And, on the other hand, it must be conceded, rich men 
feel an obligation to dispose of their wealth for public 
purposes, to a degree quite unknown in Europe. By these 
lavish gifts the people are dazzled. They feel that the 
millionaire has paid his ransom; and are ready to forgive 
irregularities in the process of acquiring wealth when they 
are atoned for by such splendid penance. Thus the rich 
man in America comes to assume the position of a kind of 

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APPEARANCES 

popular dictator. He is admired on account of his prowess, 
and forgiven on account of his beneficence. And, since 
every one feels that one day he may have the chance of 
imitating him, no one judges him too severely. He is 
regarded not as the "exploiter/' the man grown fat on 
the labour of others. Rather he is the type, the genius 
of the American people; and they point to him with pride 
as "one of our strong men," "one of our conservative 
men of business." 

Individualism, then, is stronger and deeper rooted 
in America than elsewhere. And, it must be added, 
socialism is weaker. It is an imported article, and it 
does not thrive on the new soil. The formulae of Marx 
are even less congenial to the American than to the 
English mind; and American conditions have not yet 
given rise to a native socialism, based on local conditions 
and adapted to local habits of thought. Such a native 
socialism, I believe, is bound to come before long, perhaps 
is arising even now. But I would not hazard the assertion 
that it is likely to prevail. America, it would seem, stands 
at the parting of the ways. Either she may develop on 
democratic lines — and Democracy, as I think, demonstra- 
bly implies some kind of socialism — or she may fossilise 
in the form of her present Plutocracy, and realise that new 
feudalism of industry which was dreamt of by Saint-Simon, 
by Comte, and by Carlyle. It would be a strange con- 
summation, but stranger things have happened; and it 
seems more probable that this should happen in America 

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A CONTINENT OF PIONEERS 

than that it should happen in any European country. It 
is an error to think of America as democratic; her Democ- 
racy is all on the surface. But in Europe, Democracy 
is penetrating deeper and deeper. And, in particular, 
there can be little doubt that England is now more demo- 
cratic than the United States. 



[i49l 



Ill 

NIAGARA 

I shall not describe Niagara; instead, I shall repeat a 
conversation. 

After a day spent in visiting the falls and the rapids, 
I was sitting to-night on a bench on the river bank. 
The racing water-ridges glimmered faintly in the dusk, 
and the roar of the falls droned in unwavering monot- 
ony. I fell, I think, into a kind of stupor; anyhow, I 
cannot remember when it was that someone took a 
seat beside me and began to talk. I seemed to wake 
and feel him speaking; and the first remark I definitely 
heard was this: "All America is Niagara." "All America 
is Niagara," the voice repeated — I could see no face. 
"Force without direction, noise without significance, 
speed without accomplishment. All day and all night 
the water rushes and roars. I sit and listen; and it does 
nothing. It is Nature; and Nature has no significance. 
It is we poets who create significance, and for that reason 
Nature hates us. She is afraid of us, for she knows that 
we condemn her. We have standards before which she 
shrinks abashed. But she has her revenge; for poets are 
incarnate. She owns our bodies; and she hurls us down 

[iSo] 



NIAGARA 

Niagara with the rest, with the others that she loves, and 
that love her, the virile, big-jawed men, trampling and 
trampled, hustling and hustled, working and asking no 
questions, falling as water and dispersing as spray. Na- 
ture is force, loves force, wills force alone. She hates 
the intellect, she hates the soul, she hates the spirit. 
Nietzsche understood her aright, Nietzsche the arch- 
traitor, who spied on the enemy, learned her secrets, and 
then went over to her side. Force rules th e world. ' ' 

I must have said something banal about progress, for 
the voice broke out: 

" There is no progress! It is always the same river! 
New waves succeed for ever, but always in the old forms. 
History tells, from beginning to end, the same tale — the 
victory of the strong over the sensitive, of the active over 
the reflective, of intelligence over intellect. Rome con- 
quered Greece, the Germans the Italians, the English 
the French, and now, the Americans the world! What 
matters the form of the struggle, whether it be in arms or 
commerce, whether the victory go to the sword, or to 
shoddy advertisement, and fraud? History is the peren- 
nial conquest of civilisation by barbarians. The little 
islands before us, lovely with trees and flowers, green oases 
in the rushing river, it is but a few years and they will be 
engulfed. So Greece was swallowed up, so Italy, and so 
will it be with England. Not, as your moralists maintain, 
because of her vices, but because of her virtues. She is 
becoming just, scrupulous, humane, and therefore she is 

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doomed. Ignoble though she be, she is yet too noble to 
survive; for Germany and America are baser than she. 
Hark, Hark to Niagara! Force, at all costs! Do you 
hear it? Do you see it? I can see it, though it is dark. 
It is a river of mouths and teeth, of greedy, outstretched 
hands, of mirthless laughter, of tears and of blood. I am 
there, you are there; we are hurrying over the fall; we are 
going up in spray." 

"Yes," I cried, as one cries in a nightmare, "and in that 
spray hangs the rainbow." 

He caught at the phrase. "It is true. The rainbow 
hangs in the spray! It is the type of the Ideal, hanging 
always above the Actual, never in it, never controlling it. 
We poets make the rainbow; we do not shape the world." 

"We do not make the rainbow," I said. "The sun 
makes it, shining against it. What is the sun?" 

"The sun is the Platonic Good; it lights the world, but 
does not warm it. By its illumination we see the river 
in which we are involved; see and judge, and condemn, 
and are swept away. That we can condemn is our great- 
ness; by that we are children of the sun. But our vision 
is never fruitful. The sun cannot breed out of matter; 
no, not even maggots by kissing carrion. Between Force 
and Light, Matter and Good, there is no interchange. 
Good is not a cause, it is only an idea." 

"To illuminate," I said, "is to transform." 

"No! it is only to reveal! Light dances on the surface; 
but not the tiniest wave was ever dimpled or crisped by 

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NIAGARA 

its rays. Matter alone moves matter; and the world is 
matter. Best not cry, best not even blaspheme. Pass over 
the fall in silence. Perhaps, at the bottom, there is ob- 
livion. It is the best we can hope, we who see." 

And he was gone ! Had there been anyone? Was there 
a real voice? I do not know. Perhaps it was only the 
roar of Niagara. When I returned to the hotel, I heard 
that this very afternoon, while I was sunning myself on 
one of the islands, a woman had thrown herself into the 
rapids and been swept over the fall. Niagara took her, 
as it takes a stick or a stone. Soon it will take the civilisa- 
tion of America, as it has taken that of the Indians. Cen- 
turies will pass, millenniums will pass, mankind will have 
come and gone, and still the river will flow and the sun 
shine, and they will communicate to one another their 
stern, immortal joy, in which there is no part for ephemeral 
men. 



[iS3]' 



IV 

"THE MODERN PULPIT" 

It is a bright July morning. As I sit in the garden I look 
out, over a tangle of wild roses, to a calm sea and a flock 
of white sails. Everything invites to happy thought and 
innocent reverie. Moreover, it is the day of rest, and 
every one is at leisure to turn his mind towards pleasant 
things. To what, in fact, are most people on this con- 
tinent turning theirs? To this, which I hold in my hand, 
the Sunday newspaper. 

Let us analyse this production, peculiar to the New 
World. It comprises eight sections and eighty-eight pages, 
and very likely does really, as it boasts, contain "more 
reading matter than the whole Bible." 
Opening Section i, I read the following headings: 

"Baron Shot as Bank-teller — Ends Life with 

Bullet." 
"Two fatally Hurt in Strike Riots at Pitts- 
burg." 
" Steals a Look at Busy Burglars." 
"Drowned in Surf at Narragansett." 
"Four of a Family fear a Dogs' bite" (sic). 
"Two are Dead, Two Dying; Fought over Cow." 

1*541 






"THE MODERN PULPIT" 

Section 2 appears to be concerned with similar matter, 
for example: 

"Struck by Blast, Woman is Dying." 
"Hard Shell Crabs help in giving Burglar Alarm." 
"Man who has been Married three times denies 
the Existence of God." 
But here I notice further the interesting and enigmatic 
heading: 

"Will ' boost' not ' knock' New York," 
and roused for the first time to something like curiosity, 
read: 

"To lock horns with the muckrakes and to defend New 
York against all who defame and censure it the Association 
for New York was incorporated yesterday." 

I notice also "Conferences agree to short rates on 
woollen goods," and am reminded of the shameless bar- 
gaining of which, for many weeks past, Washington has 
been the centre; which leads me to reflect on the political 
advantages of a Tariff and its wholesome effect on the 
national life. 
Section 3 deals with Aviation and seaside resorts: 

"Brave Lake Placid," I read, "Planning New 

Hotel." 
"Haines Falls entertaining a Great Throng of 

People." 
"Resound with the Laughter and Shout of Sum- 
mer Throngs." 
Section 4 consists entirely of advertisements: 

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APPEARANCES 

"Tuning-up Sale," I read. "Buff-and-crimson cards 
will mark the trail of all goods ready for the sale. We 
are tuning up. By September it is our intention to 
have assembled in these two great buildings the most 
fashionable merchandise ever shown. No one piece of 
goods will be permitted to linger that lacks, in any detail, 
the aesthetic beauty demanded by New York women of 
fashion. Everything will be better and a definite per- 
centage lower in price than New York will find in any 
other store. Do not expect a sale of ordinary proportions. 
To-morrow you will find the store alive with enthusiasm. 
This is not a summer hurrah." And so on, to the end of 
the page. Twelve pages of advertisements, uninterrupted 
by any item of news. 

Section 5 is devoted to automobile gossip and auto- 
mobile advertisements. 

Thereupon follows the Special Sporting Section: 
"Rumson Freebooters defeat Devon's first." 
" ' Young Corbett' is chipped in the 8th." 
"Doggett and Cubs each win shut out." 
"Brockett is easy for Detroit Nine." 

Glancing at the small type I read: 

"Englewood was the first to tally. This was in the 
fourth inning. W. Merritt, the first man up, was safe 
on Williams' error, and he got round to third on another 
miscue by Williams. Charley Clough was on deck with a 
timely single, which scored Merritt. Curran's out at 
first put Clough on third, from whence he tallied on Cum- 

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"THE MODERN PULPIT" 

ing's single. Cuming got to second, when Wiley grounded 
out along the first base line and scored on Reinmund's 
single. Every other time Reinmund came to the bat he 
struck out." 

I pass to the Magazine Section. 

On the first page is the mysterious heading "E. of K. 
and E." Several huge portraits of a bald, clean-shaven 
man in shirt sleeves partially explain. E. is Mr. Erlanger, 
a theatrical impresario, and K. and E. presumably are his 
firm. The article describes "the accomplishment of a 
busy man on one of his ordinary days," and makes one 
hope no day is ever extraordinary. The interviewer who 
tells about him is almost speechless with emotion. He 
searches for a phrase to express his feelings, finds it at 
last, and comes triumphantly to his close — Mr. Erlanger 
is a man "with trained arms, trained legs, a trained body, 
and a trained mind." There follows: "The Story of a 
Society Girl," in which we are told "there is a confession 
of love and the startling discovery that Dolly was a pro- 
fessional model"; "The Doctor's Story/' with a picture 
of a corpse, " whose white, shapely hands were clasped one 
over the other"; and "Would you Convict on Circum- 
stantial Evidence? — A Scaffold Confession. A True 
Story." I glance at this, and read, "While the crowd 
watched in strained, breathless silence there came a sharp, 
agonised voice and a commotion near the steps of the 
scaffold. 'Stop! Stop! The man is not guilty. I mean 
it. It is I who should stand there. Let me speak.'" 

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APPEARANCES 

You can now reconstruct the story for yourself. Next 
comes " Get the Man! Craft and courage of old-time and 
modern express-robbers matched by organised secret 
service and the mandate that makes capture alone the 
end of an unflagging man-hunt." This is accompanied 
by portraits of famous detectives and train-robbers. 

There follows "Thrilling Lines" with a picture of a 
man who seems to be looping the loop on a bicycle. 

And the conclusion of the section is a poem, entitled 
"Cynthianna Blythe," with coloured illustrations appar- 
ently intended for children, and certainly successful in 
not appealing to adults. 

Comment, I suppose, is superfluous. But it is only 
fair to say that the whole of the press of America is not 
of this character. Among the thousands of papers daily 
produced on that continent, it would be possible, I believe, 
to name ten — I myself could mention five — which 
contain in almost every issue some piece of information 
or comment which an intelligent man might care to peruse. 
There are to be found, now and again, passing references to 
European and even to Asiatic politics; for it cannot be 
said that the press of America wholly ignored the recent 
revolutions in Persia and in Turkey. I myself saw a 
reference to the new Sultan as a man "fat, but not fleshy." 
England looms big enough on the American horizon to be 
treated to an occasional gibe; and the doings of fashion- 
able Americans in London are reported somewhat fully. 
Still, on the whole, the American daily press is typified 

[158] 



"THE MODERN PULPIT" 

by the specimen I have analysed. Sensations, person- 
alities, and fiction are its stock-in-trade. Why? The 
causes are well known, but are worth recapitulating, 
for they are part of the system of modern civilisation. 

The newspaper press is a business intended to make 
money. This is its primary aim, which may, or may not, 
include the subordinate purpose of advocating some line 
of public policy. Now, to make money, it is essential 
to secure advertisements; and to secure advertisements it 
is essential to have a large circulation. But a large cir- 
culation can only be obtained by lowering the price of 
the paper, and adapting it to the leisure mood of the mass 
of people. But this leisure mood is usually one of sheer 
vacuity, incapable of intellectual effort or imaginative 
response. The man is there, waiting to be filled, and to 
be filled with the stuff easiest to digest. The rest follows. 
The newspapers supply the demand, and by supplying 
extend and perpetuate it. Among the possible appeals 
open to them they deliberately choose the lowest. For 
people are capable of Good as well as of Bad; and if they 
cannot get the Bad they will sometimes take the Good. 
Newspapers, probably, could exist, even under democratic 
conditions, by maintaining a certain standard of intelli- 
gence and morals. But it is easier to exist on melodrama, 
fatuity, and sport. And one or two papers adopting that 
course force the others into line; for here, as in so many 
departments of modern life, "The Bad drives out the 
Good." This process of deterioration of the press is 

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APPEARANCES 

proceeding rapidly in England, with the advent of the 
halfpenny newspaper. It has not gone so far as in America, 
but there is no reason why it should not, and every reason 
why it should; for the same causes are at work. 

I have called the process "deterioration," but that, of 
course, is matter of opinion. A Cabinet Minister, at a 
recent Conference in London, is reported to have con- 
gratulated the press on its progressive improvement during 
recent years. And Lord Northcliffe is a peer. The more 
the English press approximates to the American, the more, 
it would seem, it may hope for public esteem and honour. 
And that is natural, for the American method pays. 

Well, the sun still shines and the sky is still blue. But 
between it and the American people stretches a veil of 
printed paper. Curious! the fathers of this nation read 
nothing but the Bible. That, too, it may be said, was a 
veil; but a veil woven of apocalyptic visions, of lightning 
and storm, of Leviathan and the wrath of Jehovah. What 
is the stuff of the modern veil we have seen? And surely 
the contrast is calculated to evoke curious reflections. 



[160] 



IN THE ROCKIES 

Walking alone in the mountains to-day I came suddenly 
upon the railway. There was a little shanty of a station 
8000 feet above the sea; and, beyond, the great expanse 
of the plains. It was beginning to sleet, and I determined 
to take shelter. The click of a telegraph operator told 
me there was someone inside the shed. I knocked and 
knocked again, in vain; and it was a quarter of an hour 
before the door was opened by a thin, yellow-faced youth 
chewing gum, who looked at me without a sign of recogni- 
tion or a word of greeting. I have learnt by this time that 
absence of manners in an American is intended to signify 
not surliness but independence, so I asked to be allowed 
to enter. He admitted me, and resumed his operations. 
I listened to the clicking, while the sleet fell faster and the 
evening began to close in. What messages were they, I 
wondered, that were passing across the mountains? I 
connected them, idly enough, with the corner in wheat a 
famous speculator was endeavouring to establish in Chi- 
cago; and reflected upon the disproportion between the 
achievements of Man and the use he puts them to. He 
invents wireless telegraphy, and the ships call to one an- 

[161] 



APPEARANCES 

other day and night, to tell the name of the latest winner. 
He is inventing the flying-machine, and he will use it to 
advertise pills and drop bombs. And here he has ex- 
terminated the Indians, and carried his lines and his poles 
across the mountains, that a gambler may fill his pockets 
by starving a continent. " Click — click — click — Pick 
— pick — pick — Pock — pock — pockets." So the West 
called to the East, and the East to the West, while the 
winds roared, and the sleet fell, over the solitary moun- 
tains and the desolate iron road. 

It was too late now for me to reach my hotel that even- 
ing, and I was obliged to beg a night's rest. The yellow 
youth assented, with his air of elaborate indifference, and 
proceeded to make me as comfortable as he could. About 
sunset the storm passed away over the plains. Behind its 
flying fringes shot the last rays of the sun; and for a mo- 
ment the prairie sea was all bared to view, as wide as the 
sky, as calm and as profound, a thousand miles of grass 
where men and cattle crept like flies, and towns and houses 
were swallowed and lost in the infinite monotony. We 
had supper and then my host began to talk. He was a 
democrat, and we discussed the coming presidential elec- 
tion. From one newspaper topic to another we passed to 
the talk about signalling to Mars. Signalling interested 
the youth; he knew all about that; but he knew nothing 
about Mars or the stars. These were now shining bright 
above us; and I told him what I knew of suns and planets, 
of double stars, of the moons, of Jupiter, of nebulae and the 

[162] 



IN THE ROCKIES 

galaxy, and the infinity of space, and of worlds. He chewed 
and meditated, and presently remarked: "Gee! I guess 
then it doesn't matter two cents after all who gets elected 
president !" Whereupon we turned in, he to sleep and I 
to lie awake, for I was disturbed by the mystery of the 
stars. It is long since the notion of infinite space and 
infinite worlds has impressed my imagination with any- 
thing but discomfort and terror. The Ptolemaic scheme 
was better suited to human needs. Our religious sense 
demands not only order but significance; a world not merely 
great, but relevant to our destinies. Copernicus, it is true, 
gave us liberty and space; but he bereft us of security 
and intimacy. And I thought of the great vision of 
Dante, so terrible and yet so beautiful, so human through 
and through — that vision which, if it contracts space, 
expands the fate of man, and relates him to the sun and 
the moon and the stars. I thought of him as he crossed 
the Apennines by night, or heard from the sea at sunset the 
tinkling of the curfew bell, or paced in storm the forest of 
Ravenna, always, beyond and behind the urgency of busi- 
ness, the chances of war, the bitterness of exile, aware of 
the march of the sun about the earth, of its station in 
the Zodiac, of the solemn and intricate wheeling of the 
spheres. Aware, too, of the inner life of those bright 
luminaries, the dance and song of spirits purged by fire, 
the glow of Mars, the milky crystal of the moon, and Jupi- 
ter's intolerable blaze; and beyond these, kindling these, 
setting them their orbits and their order, by attraction 

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APPEARANCES 

not of gravitation, but of love, the ultimate Essence, 
imaged by purest light and hottest fire, whereby all things 
and all creatures move in their courses and their fates, to 
whom they tend and in whom they rest. 
And I recalled the passage: 



"Frate, la nostra volonta quieta 
Virtu di carita, che fa volerne 
Sol quel ch'avemo, e d'altro non ci asseta. 

Se disiassimo esser piu superne, 
F6ran discordi gli nostri disiri 
Dal voler di Colui che qui ne cerne; 

Che vedrai non caper e in questi giri, 
S'essere in caritate e qui necesse, 
E se la sua natura ben rimiri; 

Anzi e formale ad esto beato esse 
Tenersi dentro alia divina voglia, 
Perch'una fansi nostre voglie stesse. 

Si che, come noi siam di soglia in soglia 
Per questo regno, a tutto il regno piace, 
Com'allo re, che in suo voler ne in voglia. 

E la sua volontade e nostra pace: 
Ella e quel mare al qual tutto si muove 
Cio ch' ella crea o che natura face." 1 



\ 



1 "Brother, the quality of love stilleth our will, and maketh us 
long only for what we have, and giveth us no other thirst. 

"Did we desire to be more aloft, our longings were discordant 
from his will who here assorteth us, 

"And for that, thou wilt see, there is no room within these cir- 
cles, if of necessity we have our being here in love, and if thou think 
again what is love's nature. 

"Nay, 'tis the essence of this blessed being to hold ourselves 
within the divine will, whereby our own wills are themselves made 
one. 

"So that our being thus, from threshold unto threshold, through- 
out the realm, is a joy to all the realm as to the King, who draweth 
our wills to what he willeth; 

[i6 4 ] 



IN THE ROCKIES 

And then, with a leap, I was back to what we call reality 
— to the clicking needle, to the corner in wheat, to Chicago 
and Pittsburg and New York. In all this continent, I 
thought, in all the western world, there is not a human 
soul whose will seeks any peace at all, least of all the peace 
of God. All move, but about no centre; they move on, 
to more power, to more wealth, to more motion. There 
is not one of them who conceives that he has a place, if 
only he could find it, a rank and order fitted to his nature, 
higher than some, lower than others, but right, and the 
only right for him, his true position in the cosmic scheme, 
his ultimate relation to the Power whence it proceeds. 
Life, like astronomy, has become Copernican. It has no 
centre, no significance, or, if any, one beyond our ken. 
Gravitation drives us, not love. We are attracted and 
repelled by a force we cannot control, a force that resides 
in our muscles and our nerves, not in our will and spirit. 
" Click — click — click — tick — tick — tick," so goes the 
economic clock. And that clock, with its silly face, has 
shut us out from the stars. It tells us the time ; but behind 
the dial of the hours is now for us no vision of the solemn, 
wheeling spheres, of spirit flames and that ultimate point 
of light "pinnacled dim in the intense inane. ,, "America 
is a clock," I said; and then I remembered the phrase, 
"America is Niagara." And like a flake of foam, dizzy 



"And his will is our peace; it is that sea to which all moves that 
it create th and that nature maketh. 

Dante, Purgatorio, iii. 70-87 (trans, by Rev. Philip H. 
Wicksteed, in the " Temple Classics" edition). 

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APPEARANCES 

and lost, I was swept away, out into the infinite, out into 
unconsciousness. 

The sun was shining brightly when I woke, and I had 
slept away my mood of the night. I took leave of my 
host, and under his directions, after half a mile along the 
line, plunged down into a gorge, and followed for miles, 
crossing and re-crossing, a mountain brook, between cliffs 
of red rocks, by fields of mauve anemones, in the shadow 
and fragrance of pines; till suddenly, after hours of rough 
going, I was confronted by a notice, set up, apparently, 
in the desert: 

"Keep out. Avoid trouble. This means you." 

I laughed. "Keep out!" I said. "If only there were 
a chance of my getting in!" "Avoid trouble! Ah, what 
trouble would I not face, could I but get in ! " And I went 
on, but not in, and met no trouble, and returned to the 
hotel, and had dinner, and watched for a solitary hour, in 
the hall, the shifting, interminable array of vacant eyes 
and blank faces, and then retired to write this letter; " and 
so to bed." 



[166] 



VI 

IN THE ADIRONDACKS 

For the last few days I have been living in camp on a 
mountain lake in the Adirondacks. All about me are 
mountains and unlumbered forest. The tree lies where 
it falls; the undergrowth chokes the trails; and on the 
hottest day it is cool in the green, sun-chequered wilderness. 
Deer start in the thickets or steal down to drink in the 
lake. The only sounds are the woodpecker's scream, the 
song of the hermit-thrush, the thrumming and drumming 
of bullfrogs in the water. My friend is a sportsman; I 
am not; and while he catches trout I have been reading 
Homer and Shelley. Shelley I have always understood; 
but now, for the first time, I seem to understand Homer. 
Our guide here, I feel, might have been Homer, if he had 
had imagination; but he could never have been Shelley. 
Homer, I conceive, had from the first the normal bent for 
action. What his fellows did he, too, wanted to do. He 
learned to hunt, to sail a boat, to build a house, to use a 
spear and bow. He had his initiation early, in conflict, 
in danger, and in death. He loved the feast, the dance, 
and the song. But also he had dreams. He used to sit 
alone and think. And, as he grew, these moods grew, 

[167] 



APPEARANCES 

till he came to live a second life, a kind of double of the 
first. The one was direct, unreflective, and purposeful. 
In it he hunted wild beasts that he might kill them, fought 
battles that he might win them, sailed boats that he 
might arrive somewhere. So far, he was like his fellows, 
like our guide, with his quick observation, his varied ex- 
perience, his practical skill. But then, on the other hand, 
he had imagination. This active life he reproduced; not 
by recapitulating it — that the guide can do; but by re- 
creating it. He detached it, as it were, from himself as 
centre; ceased, indeed, to be a self; and became all that he 
contemplated — the victor and the vanquished, the hunter 
and the hunted, the house and its builder, Thersites and 
Achilles. He became the sun and the moon and the stars, 
the gods and the laughter of the gods. He took no sides, 
pronounced no judgment, espoused no cause. He became 
pure vision; but not passive vision. To see, he had to 
re-create; and the material his observation had amassed 
he offered up as a holocaust on the altar of his imagination. 
Fused in that fierce fire, like drew to like, parts ran together 
and formed a whole. Did he see a warrior fall? In a 
moment the image arose of "a stately poplar falling by the 
axe in a meadow by the riverside." Did a host move out 
to meet the foe? It recalled the ocean shore where "wave 
follows wave far out at sea until they break in thunder 
on the beach." Was battle engaged? "The clash of the 
weapons rang like the din of woodcutters in the mountain- 
glades." Did a wounded hero fall? The combatants 

[168] 



IN THE ADIRONDACKS 

gathered about him "like flies buzzing round the brimming 
milk-pails in the spring." All commonest things, redeemed 
from isolation and irrelevance, revealed the significance 
with which they were charged. The result was the actual 
made real, a reflection which was a disclosure, a reproduc- 
tion which was a recreation. And if experience, as we 
know it, is the last word of life, if there is nothing beyond 
and nothing behind, if there is no meaning, no explanation, 
no purpose or end, then the poetry of Homer is the highest 
reach of human achievement. 

For, observe, Homer is not a critic. His vision trans- 
mutes life, but does not transcend it. Experience is ulti- 
mate; all the poet does is to experience fully. Common 
men live, but do not realise life; he realises it. But he 
does not question it; it is there and it is final; glorious, 
lovely, august, terrible, sordid, cruel, unjust. And the 
partial, smiling, unmoved, unaccountable Olympians are 
the symbol of its brute actuality. Not only is there no ex- 
planation, there is not even a question to be asked. So it is, 
so it has been, so it will be. Homer's outlook is that of the 
modern realist. That he wrote an epic, and they novels, is 
an accident of time and space. Turgeneff or Balzac writ- 
ing iooo years before Christ would have been Homer; and 
Homer, writing now, would have been Turgeneff or Balzac. 

But Shelley could never have been Homer; for he was 
born a critic and a rebel. From the first dawn of con- 
sciousness he challenged and defied the works and ways 
of men, and the apparent order of the universe. Never for 

[169] 



APPEARANCES 

a moment anywhere was he at home in the world. There 
was nothing attainable he cared to pursue, nothing actual 
he cared to represent. He could no more see what is 
called fact than he could act upon it. His eyes were daz- 
zled by a different vision. Life and the world not only 
are intolerable to him, they are unreal. Beyond and be- 
hind lies Reality, and it is good. Now it is a Perfectibility 
lying in the future; now a Perfection existing eternally. 
In any case, whatever it be, however and wherever to be 
found, it is the sole object of his quest and of his song. 
Whatever of good or lovely or passionate gleams here and 
there, on the surface or in the depths of the actual, is a 
ray of that Sun, an image of that Beauty. His imagina- 
tion is kindled by Appearance only to soar away from it. 
The landscape he depicts is all light, all fountains and 
caverns. The Beings with which it is peopled are dis- 
carnate Joys and Hopes; Justice and Liberty, Peace and 
Love and Truth. Among these only is he at home; in the 
world of men he is an alien captive; and Human Life pre- 
sents itself as an "unquiet dream." 

" 'Tis we that, lost in stormy visions, keep 
With phantoms an unprofitable strife, 
And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife 
Invulnerable nothings." 

When we die, we awake into Reality — that Reality to 
which, from the beginning, Shelley was consecrated: 

"I vowed that I would dedicate my powers 
To thee and thine — have I not kept my vow?" 

[170] 



IN THE ADIRONDACKS 

He calls it " intellectual Beauty "; he impersonates it as 
Asia, and sings it in verse that passes beyond sense into 
music: 

"Life of Life! thy lips enkindle 

With their love the breath between them; 

And thy smiles before they dwindle 
Make the cold air fire; then screen them 

In those looks, where whoso gazes 

Faints, entangled in their mazes. 

Child of Light! thy limbs are burning 
Through the vest which seems to hide them; 

As the radiant lines of morning 
Through the clouds ere they divide them; 

And this atmosphere divinest 

Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest. 

Fair are others; none beholds thee, 

But thy voice sounds low and tender 
Like the fairest, for it folds thee 

From the sight, that liquid splendour, 
And all feel, yet see thee never, 
As I feel now, lost for ever! 

Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest 
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, 

And the souls of whom thou lovest 
Walk upon the winds with lightness, 

Till they fail, as I am failing, 

Dizzy, lost, yet unbe wailing !" 

This we call poetry; and we call the Iliad poetry. But 
the likeness is superficial, and the difference profound. 

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APPEARANCES 

Was it Homer or Shelley that grasped Reality? This is 
not a question of literary excellence; it is a question of 
the sense of life. And — oddly enough — it is a question 
to which the intellect has no answer. The life in each of 
us takes hold of it and answers it empirically. The normal 
man is Homeric, though he is not aware of the fact. 
Especially is the American Homeric; naif, spontaneous, at 
home with fact, implicitly denying the Beyond. Is he 
right? This whole continent, the prairies, the mountains, 
and the coast, the trams and trolleys, the skyscrapers, the 
factories, elevators, automobiles, shout to that question 
one long, deafening Yes. But there is another country 
that speaks a different tongue. Before America was, 
India is. 



[172] 



VII 

THE RELIGION OF BUSINESS 

In the house in which I am staying hangs an old coloured 
print, representing two couples, one young and lusty, the 
other decrepit, the woman carrying an hour-glass, the 
man leaning on a stick; and underneath, the following in- 
scription: 

"My father and mother that go stuping to your grave, 
Pray tell me what good I may in this world expect to have? " 

"My son, the good y° can expect is all forlorn, 
Men doe not gather grapes from of a thorn." 

This dialogue, I sometimes think, symbolises the attitude 
of the new world to the old, and the old to the new. Not 
seldom I feel among Americans as the Egyptian is said to 
have felt among the Greeks, that I am moving in a world of 
precocious and inexperienced children, bearing on my 
own shoulders the weight of the centuries. Yet it is not 
exactly that Americans strike one as young in spirit; rather 
they strike one as undeveloped. It is as though they had 
never faced life and asked themselves what it is; as though 
they were so occupied in running that it has never occurred 

[i73] 



APPEARANCES 

to them to inquire where they started and whither they 
are going. They seem to be always doing and never ex- 
periencing. A dimension of life, one would say, is lacking, 
and they live in a plane instead of in a solid. That missing 
dimension I shall call religion. Not that Americans do 
not, for aught I know, " believe' ' as much as or more than 
Europeans; but they appear neither to believe nor to dis- 
believe religiously. That, I admit, is true almost every- 
where of the mass of the people. But even in Europe — 
and far more in India — there has always been, and still 
is, a minority who open windows to the stars; and through 
these windows, in passing, the plain man sometimes looks. 
The impression America makes on me is that the windows 
are blocked up. It has become incredible that this con- 
tinent was colonised by the Pilgrim Fathers. That in- 
tense, narrow, unlovely, but genuine spiritual life has been 
transformed into industrial energy; and this energy, in its 
new form, the churches, oddly enough, are endeavouring 
to recapture and use to drive their machines. Religion 
is becoming a department of practical business. The 
churches — orthodox and unorthodox, old and new, Chris- 
tian, Christian-Scientific, theosophic, higher-thinking — 
vie with one another in advertising goods which are all 
material benefits: " Follow me, and you will get rich, r 
" Follow me, and you will get well," " Follow me, and you 
will be cheerful, prosperous, successful." Religion in 
America is nothing if not practical. It does not concern 
itself with a life beyond; it gives you here and now what 

[174] 



THE RELIGION OF BUSINESS 

you want. " What do you want? Money? Come along ! 
— Success? This is the shop! — Health? Here you are! 
Better than patent medicines !" The only part of the 
Gospels one would suppose that interests the modern 
American is the miracles; for the miracles really did do 
something. As for the Sermon on the Mount — well, no 
Westerner ever took that seriously. 

This conversion of religion into business is interesting 
enough. But even more striking is what looks like a con- 
version of business into religion. Business is so serious 
that it sometimes assumes the shrill tone of a revivalist 
propaganda. There has recently been brought to my 
attention a circular addressed to the agents of an insurance 
society, urging them to rally round the firm, with a special 
effort, in what I can only call a " mission-month." I 
quote — with apologies to the unknown author — part of 
this production: 

The Call to Action. 

"How about these beautiful spring days for hustling? 
Everything is on the move. New life and force is appar- 
ent everywhere. The man who can stand still when all 
creation is on the move is literally and hopelessly a dead 
one. 

"These are ideal days for the insurance field-man. 
Weather like this has a tremendously favourable effect on 
business. In the city and small town alike there is a genu- 
ine revival of business. The farmer, the merchant, the 

[175] 



APPEARANCES 

manufacturer, are beginning to work overtime. Spring 
is in the footstep of the ambitious man as well as in the 
onward march of nature. This is the day of growth, ex- 
pansion, creation, and re-creation. 

" Consciously or unconsciously every one responds to the 
glad call to new life and vigour. Men who are cold and 
selfish, who are literally frozen up the winter through, 
yield to the warm, invigorating, energising touch of spring. 

"Gentlemen of the field force, now is the psychological 
moment to force your prospects to action as indicated by 
the dotted line. As in nature, some plants and trees are 
harder to force than others, so in the nature of human pros- 
pects, some are more difficult than others. Sunshine and 
rain will produce results in the field of life-underwriting. 

"Will it not be possible for you during these five re- 
maining days not only to increase the production from 
regular sources, but to go out into the highways and hedges 
and compel others to sign their applications, if for only a 
small amount? 

"Everything is now in full swing, and we are going to 
close up the month 



Might not this almost as well have been an address from 
the headquarters of the Salvation Army? And is not the 
following exactly parallel to a denunciation, from the 
mission-pulpit, of the unprofitable servant? 

"A few days ago we heard of a general agent who has 

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THE RELIGION OF BUSINESS 

one of the largest and most prosperous territories in this 
country. He has been in the business for years, and yet 
that man, for some unknown reason, rather apologises for 
his vocation. He said he was a little ashamed of his calling. 
Such a condition is almost a crime, and I am sure that the 
men of the Eastern Department will say, that man ought 
to get out of the business. 

"Instead of being ashamed of his calling, he should be 
mortally ashamed of his not calling. 

"Are you happy in your work? If not, give it up and 
go into some business more to your liking." 

Why Is It ? 

"So many times the question is asked, 'Why is it, and 
how is it, that Mr. So-and-so writes so much business? 
There is not a week but he procures new applications.' 
Gentlemen, there's but one answer to this question. There 
is a great gulf between the man who is in earnest and works 
persistently every day and the man who seems to be in 
earnest and makes believe he is working persistently every 
day. 

"One of the most successful personal producers said 
to the writer the other day: 'No wonder certain agents do 
not write more business. I couldn't accomplish very 
much either if I did not work longer hours than they do. 
Some insurance agents live like millionaires and keep 
bankers' hours. You cannot expect much business from 

[i77] 



APPEARANCES 

efforts like that.' This man speaks from practical knowl- 
edge of the business. He has written 

$147,500 in personal business in the last six weeks. 

"It does seem rather strange, sometimes, that half of 
the men in the Eastern Department should be writing 
twice as much business as the other half. They are rep- 
resenting the same company; presenting the same propo- 
sitions; are supposed to be talking to practically the same 
number of men; have the same rates, same guarantees, 
and the same twenty-four hours in each day, and yet are 
doing twice the business. In other words, making more 
money. What really makes this difference? I will tell 
you. They put heart into their work. There is an en- 
thusiasm and earnestness about them that carries con- 
viction. They are business through and through, and 
everybody knows it. 

"Are you getting your share of applications? If some 
other agent is up early, wide-awake and alert, putting in 
from ten to fifteen hours per day, he is bound to do busi- 
ness, isn't he? This is a plain, every-day, horse-sense, 
business fact. No one has a patent on time or the use 
of it. To work and to succeed is common property. It 
is your capital, and the use of it will determine your worth." 

I think, really, this is one of the most remarkable docu- 
ments that could be produced in evidence of the character 
of American civilisation. There is all the push, initiative, 
and enterprise on which they justly pride themselves; 

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THE RELIGION OF BUSINESS 

there is also the reduction of all values to terms of business, 
the concentration of what, at other times, have been moral 
and religious forces upon the one aim of material progress. 
In such an atmosphere it is easy to see how those who care 
for spiritual values are led to protest that these are really 
material; to pack up their goods, so to speak, as if they 
were biscuits or pork, and palm them off in that guise on 
an unsuspecting public. In a world where every one is 
hustling, the Churches feel they must hustle, too; when all 
the firms advertise, they must advertise, too; when only 
one thing is valued, power, they must pretend they can 
offer power; they must go into business, because business 
is going into religion! 

It is a curious spectacle! How long will it last? How 
real is it, even now? That withered couple, I half believe, 
hanging on the wall, descend at night and wander through 
the land, whispering to all the sleepers their disquieting 
warning; and all day long there hovers at the back of the 
minds of these active men a sense of discomfort which, if 
it became articulate, might express itself in the ancient 
words: 

"My son, the good y° can expect is all forlorn, 
Men doe not gather grapes from of a thorn." 



[179] 



VIII 

RED-BLOODS AND " MOLLYCODDLES " 

I am staying at a pleasant place in New Hampshire. The 
country is hilly and wooded, like a larger and wilder Surrey, 
and through it flows what, to an Englishman, seems a 
large river, the Connecticut. Charming villas are dotted 
about, well designed and secluded, in pretty gardens. I 
mention this because, in my experience of America, it is 
unique. Almost everywhere the houses stare blankly at 
one another and at the public roads, ugly, unsheltered, and 
unashamed, as much as to say, " Every one is welcome to 
see what goes on here. We court publicity. See how we 
eat, drink, and sleep. Our private life is the property of 
the American people." It was not, however, to describe 
the country that I began this letter, but to elaborate a 
generalisation developed by my host and myself as a 
kind of self -protection against the gospel of "strenuous- 
ness. ,, 

We have divided men into Red-bloods and Molly- 
coddles. "A Red-blood man" is a phrase which explains 
itself, " Mollycoddle" is its opposite. We have adopted 
it from a famous speech of Mr. Roosevelt, and redeemed 
it — perverted it, if you will — to other uses. A few ex- 

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RED-BLOODS AND " MOLLYCODDLES" 

amples will make the notion clear. Shakspere's Henry 
V. is a typical Red-blood; so was Bismarck; so was Palmer- 
ston; so is almost any business man. On the other hand, 
typical Mollycoddles were Socrates, Voltaire, and Shelley. 
The terms, you will observe, are comprehensive, and the 
types very broad. Generally speaking, men of action are 
Red-bloods. Not but what the Mollycoddle may act, and 
act efficiently. But, if so, he acts from principle, not from 
the instinct of action. The Red-blood, on the other hand, 
acts as the stone falls, and does indiscriminately anything 
that comes to hand. It is thus he that carries on the busi- 
ness of the world. He steps without reflection into the 
first place offered him and goes to work like a machine. 
The ideals and standards of his family, his class, his city, 
his country, and his age, he swallows as naturally as he 
swallows food and drink. He is therefore always "in the 
swim"; and he is bound to "arrive," because he has set 
before himself the attainable. You will find him every- 
where, in all the prominent positions. In a military age 
he is a soldier, in a commercial age a business man. He 
hates his enemies, and he may love his friends; but he does 
not require friends to love. A wife and children he does 
require, for the instinct to propagate the race is as strong 
in him as all other instincts. His domestic life, however, 
is not always happy; for he can seldom understand his 
wife. This is part of his general incapacity to understand 
any point of view but his own. He is incapable of an 
idea and contemptuous of a principle. He is the Samson, 

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APPEARANCES 

the blind force, dearest to Nature of her children. He 
neither looks back nor looks ahead. He lives in present 
action. And when he can no longer act, he loses his reason 
for existence. The Red-blood is happiest if he dies in the 
prime of life; otherwise, he may easily end with suicide. 
For he has no inner life; and when the outer life fails, he 
can only fail with it. The instinct that animated him 
being dead, he dies, too. Nature, who has blown through 
him, blows elsewhere. His stops are dumb; he is dead 
wood on the shore. 

The Mollycoddle, on the other hand, is all inner life. 
He may indeed act, as I said, but he acts, so to speak, by 
accident; just as the Red-blood may reflect, but reflects 
by accident. The Mollycoddle in action is the Crank: 
it is he who accomplishes reforms; who abolished slavery, 
for example, and revolutionised prisons and lunatic asy- 
lums. Still, primarily, the Mollycoddle is a critic, not a 
man of action. He challenges all standards and all facts. 
If an institution is established, that is a reason why he 
will not accept it; if an idea is current, that is a reason why 
he should repudiate it. He questions everything, includ- 
ing life and the universe. And for that reason Nature 
hates him. On the Red-blood she heaps her favours; she 
gives him a good digestion, a clear complexion, and sound 
nerves. But to the Mollycoddle she apportions dyspepsia 
and black bile. In the universe and in society the Molly- 
coddle is "out of it" as inevitably as the Red-blood is 
"in it." At school, he is a "smug" or a "swat," while 

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RED-BLOODS AND "MOLLYCODDLES" 

the Red-blood is captain of the Eleven. At college, he is 
an "intellectual/' while the Red-blood is in the "best set." 
In the world, he courts failure while the Red-blood achieves 
success. The Red-blood sees nothing; but the Mollycoddle 
sees through everything. The Red-blood joins societies; 
the Mollycoddle is a non-joiner. Individualist of in- 
dividualists, he can only stand alone, while the Red-blood 
requires the support of a crowd. The Mollycoddle en- 
genders ideas, and the Red-blood exploits them. The 
Mollycoddle discovers, and the Red-blood invents. The 
whole structure of civilisation rests on foundations laid 
by Mollycoddles; but all the building is done by Red- 
bloods. The Red-blood despises the Mollycoddle; but, in 
the long run, he does what the Mollycoddle tells him. 
The Mollycoddle also despises the Red-blood, but he 
cannot do without him. Each thinks he is master of the 
other, and, in a sense, each is right. In his lifetime the 
Mollycoddle may be the slave of the Red-blood; but after 
his death, he is his master, though the Red-blood know it 
not. 

Nations, like men, may be classified roughly as Red- 
blood and Mollycoddle. To the latter class belong clearly 
the ancient Greeks, the Italians, the French, and probably 
the Russians; to the former the Romans, the Germans, 
and the English. But the Red-blood nation par excellence 
is the American; so that, in comparison with them, Europe 
as a whole might almost be called Mollycoddle. This 
characteristic of Americans is reflected in the predominant 

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APPEARANCES 

physical type — the great jaw and chin, the huge teeth 
and predatory mouth; in their speech, where beauty and 
distinction are sacrificed to force; in their need to live and 
feel and act in masses. To be born a Mollycoddle in 
America is to be born to a hard fate. You must either 
emigrate or succumb. This, at least, hitherto has been 
the alternative practised. Whether a Mollycoddle will 
ever be produced strong enough to breathe the American 
atmosphere and live, is a crucial question for the future. 
It is the question whether America will ever be civilised. 
For civilisation, you will have perceived, depends on a 
just balance of Red-bloods and Mollycoddles. Without 
the Red-blood there would be no life at all, no stuff, so 
to speak, for the Mollycoddle to work upon; without the 
Mollycoddle, the stuff would remain shapeless and chaotic. 
The Red-blood is the matter, the Mollycoddle the form; 
the Red-blood the dough, the Mollycoddle the yeast. 
On these two poles turns the orb of human society. And 
if, at this point, you choose to say that poles are points and 
have no dimensions, that strictly neither the Mollycoddle 
nor the Red-blood exist, and that real men contain ele- 
ments of both mixed in different proportions, I have no 
quarrel with you except such as one has with the man who 
states the obvious. I am satisfied to have distinguished 
the ideal extremes between which the Actual vibrates. 
The detailed application of the conception I must leave 
to more patient researchers. 
One point more before I close. This Dichotomy, so 

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RED-BLOODS AND " MOLLYCODDLES" 

far as I can see, applies only to man. Woman appears to 
be a kind of hybrid. Regarded as a creature of instinct, 
she resembles the Red-blood, and it is to him that she is 
first attracted. The hero of her youth is the athlete, the 
soldier, the successful man of business; and this predilection 
of hers accounts for much of human history, and in par- 
ticular for the maintenance of the military spirit. On the 
other hand, as a creature capable of and craving sympathy, 
she has affinities with the Mollycoddle. This dual nature 
is the tragedy of her life. The Red-blood awakens her 
passion, but cannot satisfy it. He wins her by his virility, 
but cannot retain her by his perception. Hence the fact, 
noted by a cynic, that it is the Mollycoddle who cuckolds 
the Red-blood. For the woman, married to the Red-blood, 
discovers too late that she is to him only a trophy, a scalp. 
He hangs her up in the hall, and goes about his business. 
Then comes the Mollycoddle, divining all, possessing and 
offering all. And if the Red-blood is an American, and 
the Mollycoddle an European, then the situation is tense 
indeed. For the American Red-blood despises woman in 
his heart as profoundly as he respects her in outer obser- 
vance. He despises her because of the Mollycoddle he 
divines in her. Therefore he never understands her; and 
that is why European Mollycoddles carry off American 
women before the very eyes of the exasperated Red-blood. 
"Am I not clean? " he cries. "Am I not healthy? Am I 
not athletic and efficient?" He is, but it does not help 
him, except with young girls. He may win the body, but 

[185] 



APPEARANCES 

he cannot win the soul. Can it be true then that most 
women would like two husbands, one Red-blood, the other 
Mollycoddle, one to be the father of their children, the 
other to be the companion of their souls? Women alone 
can answer; and, for the first time in history, they are 
beginning to be articulate. 



[186J 



IX 

ADVERTISEMENT 

The last two days and nights I spent in a railway train. 
We passed through some beautiful country; that, I believe, 
is the fact; but my feeling is that I have emerged from a 
nightmare. In my mind is a jumbled vision of huge 
wooden cows cut out in profile and offering from dry 
udders a fibrous milk; of tins of biscuits portrayed with a 
ghastly realism of perspective, and mendaciously scream- 
ing that I needed them — U-need-a biscuit; of gigantic 
quakers, multiplied as in an interminable series of mirrors, 
and offering me a myriad meals of indigestible oats; of 
huge, painted bulls in a kind of discontinuous frieze bellow- 
ing to the heavens a challenge to produce a better tobacco 
than theirs; of the head of a gentleman, with pink cheeks 
and a black moustache, recurring, like a decimal, ad in- 
finitum on the top of a board, to inform me that his beauty 
is the product of his own toilet powder; of codfish without 
bones — "the kind you have always bought"; of bacon 
packed in glass jars; of whiz suspenders, sen-sen throat- 
ease, sure-fit hose, and the whole army of patent medicines. 
By river, wood, and meadow, hamlet or city, mountain 
or plain, hovers and flits this obscene host; never to be 

[187] 



APPEARANCES 

escaped from, never to be forgotten, fixing, with inexorable 
determination, a fancy that might be tempted to roam to 
that one fundamental fact of life, the operation of the 
bowels. 

Nor, of course, are these incubi, these ghostly emanations 
of the One God Trade, confined to the American continent. 
They haunt with equal pertinacity the lovelier landscapes 
of England; they line the route to Venice; they squat on 
the Alps and float on the Rhine; they are beginning to 
occupy the very air, and, with the advent of the air-ship, 
will obliterate the moon and the stars, and scatter over 
every lonely moor and solitary mountain peak memorials 
of the stomach, of the liver, and the lungs. Never, in 
effect, says modern business to the soul of man, never and 
nowhere shall you forget that you are nothing but a body; 
that you require to eat, to salivate, to digest, to evacuate; 
that you are liable to arthritis, blood-poisoning, catarrh, 
colitis, calvity, constipation, consumption, diarrhoea, dia- 
betes, dysmenorrhoea, epilepsy, eczema, fatty degenera- 
tion, gout, goitre, gastritis, headache, haemorrhage, hysteria, 
hypertrophy, idiocy, indigestion, jaundice, lockjaw, melan- 
cholia, neuralgia, ophthalmia, phthisis, quinsey, rheuma- 
tism, rickets, sciatica, syphilis, tonsilitis, tic doloureux, 
and so on to the end of the alphabet and back again to 
the beginning. Never and nowhere shall you forget that 
you are a trading animal, buying in the cheapest and selling 
in the dearest market. Never shall you forget that noth- 
ing matters — nothing in the whole universe — except the 

[188] 



ADVERTISEMENT 

maintenance and extension of industry; that beauty, peace, 
harmony are not commercial values, and cannot be allowed 
for a moment to stand in the way of the advance of trade; 
that nothing, in short, matters except wealth, and that 
there is no wealth except money in the pocket. This — 
did it ever occur to you — is the real public education 
every country is giving, on every hoarding and sky-sign, 
to its citizens of every age, at every moment of their lives. 
And that being so, is it not a little ironical that children 
should be taught for half an hour in school to read a poem 
of Wordsworth or a play of Shakspere, when for the rest 
of the twenty-four hours there is being photographed on 
their minds the ubiquitous literature of Owbridge and 
of Carter? 

But of course advertisement cannot be interfered with! 
It is the life-blood of the nation. All traders, all politicians, 
all journalists say so. They sometimes add that it is 
really, to an unprejudiced spirit, beautiful and elevating. 
Thus only this morning I came across an article in a leading 
New York newspaper, which remarks that: "The individ- 
ual advertisement is commonly in good taste, both in 
legend and in illustration. Many are positively beautiful; 
and, as a wit has truly said, the cereal advertisements in 
the magazines are far more interesting than the serial 
stories." This latter statement I can easily believe; but 
when I read the former there flitted across my mind a 
picture of a lady lightly clad reclining asleep against an 
open window, a full moon rising in the distance over a 

[189] 



APPEARANCES 

lake, with the legend attached, "Cascarella — it works 
while you sleep." 

The article from which I have quoted is interesting not 
only as illustrating the diversity of taste, but as indicat- 
ing the high degree of development which has now been 
attained by what is at once the art and the science of 
advertisement. "The study of advertisement/ ' it begins, 
"seems to have a perennial charm for the American public. 
Hardly a month passes but some magazine finds a new 
and inviting phase of this modern art to lay before its 
readers. The solid literature of advertisement is also 
growing rapidly. . . . The technique of the subject 
is almost as extensive as that of scientific agriculture. 
Whole volumes have been compiled on the art of writing 
advertisements. Commercial schools and colleges devote 
courses of study to the subject. Indeed the corner-stone 
of the curriculum of a well-known business college is an 
elective upon ' Window-dressing. ' " That you may be under 
no misapprehension, I must add that this article appears 
in what is admittedly the most serious and respectable of 
the New York newspapers; and that it is not conceived 
in the spirit of irony or hyperbole. To the American, 
advertisement is a serious, important, and elevating 
department of business, and those who make it their 
specialty endeavour to base their operations on a profound 
study of human nature. One of these gentlemen has ex- 
pounded, in a book which has a wide circulation, the whole 
philosophy of his liberal profession. He calls the book 

[190] 



ADVERTISEMENT 

Imagination in Business; 1 and I remark incidentally 
that the use of the word "imagination," like that of "art," 
in this connection, shows where the inquirer ought to look 
for the manifestation, on this continent, of the aesthetic 
spirit. "The imaginative man," says the writer, "sends 
his thought through all the instincts, passions, and prej- 
udices of men, he knows their desires and their regrets, 
he knows every human weakness and its sure decoy." It 
is this latter clause that is relevant to his theme. Poets 
in earlier ages wrote epics and dramas, they celebrated 
the strength and nobility of men; but the poet of the mod- 
ern world "cleverly builds on the frailties of mankind." 
Of these the chief is "the inability to throw away an ele- 
ment of value, even though it cannot be utilised." On 
this great principle is constructed the whole art and science 
of advertisement. And my author proceeds to give a 
series of illustrations, "each of which is an actual fact, 
either in my experience, or of which I have been cognisant." 
Space and copyright forbid me to quote. I must refer 
the reader to the original source. 

Nowhere else will be found so lucid an expression of the 
whole theory and practice of modern trade. That theory 
and practice is being taught in schools of commerce through- 
out the Union, and there are many, I suppose, who would 
like to see it taught in English universities. But, really, 
does anyone — does any man of business — think it a 
better education than Greek? 



1 Imagination in Business (Harper's), 

[191] 



X 

CULTURE 

Scene, a club in a Canadian city; persons, a professor, a 
doctor, a business man, and a traveller (myself). Wine, 
cigars, anecdotes; and suddenly, popping up, like a Jack- 
in-the-box absurdly crowned with ivy, the intolerable sub- 
ject of education. I do not remember how it began; but 
I know there came a point at which, before I knew where 
I was, I found myself being assailed on the subject of 
Oxford and Cambridge. Not, however, in the way you 
may anticipate. Those ancient seats of learning were not 
denounced as fossilised, effete, and corrupt. On the con- 
trary, I was pressed, urged, implored, almost with tears 
in the eye — to reform them? No! to let them alone! 

"For heaven's sake, keep them as they are! You don't 
know what you've got, and what you might lose! We 
know! We've had to do without it! And we know that 
without it everything else is of no avail. We bluster and 
brag about education on this side of the Atlantic. But 
in our heart of hearts we know that we have missed the 
one thing needful, and that you, over in England, have 
got it." 

"And that one thing? " 

[192] 



CULTURE 

" Is Culture ! Yes, in spite of Matthew Arnold, Culture, 
and Culture, and always Culture !" 

" Meaning by Culture? " 

" Meaning Aristotle instead of Agriculture, Homer 
instead of Hygiene, Shakspere instead of the Stock 
Exchange, Bacon instead of Banking, Plato instead 
of Paedagogics! Meaning intellect before intelligence, 
thought before dexterity, discovery before invention! 
Meaning the only thing that is really practical, ideas; and 
the only thing that is really human, the Humanities !" 

Rather apologetically, I began to explain. At Oxford, 
I said, no doubt the Humanities still hold the first place. 
But at Cambridge they have long been relegated to the 
second or the third. There we have schools of Natural 
Science, of Economics, of Engineering, of Agriculture. 
We have even a Training College in Paedagogics. Their 
faces fell, and they renewed their passionate appeal. 

"Stop it," they cried. "For heaven's sake, stop it! 
In all those things we've got you skinned alive over here! 
If you want Agriculture, go to Wisconsin! If you want 
Medicine, go to the Rockefeller Institute! If you want 
Engineering, go to Pittsburg! But preserve still for the 
English-speaking world what you alone can give! Pre- 
serve liberal culture! Preserve the Classics! Preserve 
Mathematics! Preserve the seed-ground of all practical 
inventions and appliances! Preserve the integrity of the 
human mind!" 

Interesting, is it not? These gentlemen, no doubt, were 

[i93] 



APPEARANCES 

not typical Canadians. But they were not the least in- 
telligent men I have met on this continent. And when 
they had finally landed me in my sleeping-berth in the 
train, and I was left to my own reflections in that most 
uncomfortable of all situations, I began to consider how 
odd it was that in matters educational we are always en- 
deavouring to reform the only part of our system that 
excites the admiration of foreigners. 

I do not intend, however, to plunge into that contro- 
versy. The point that interests me is the view of my 
Canadian friends that in America there is no " culture." 
And, in the sense they gave to that term, I think they 
are right. There is no culture in America. There is 
instruction; there is research; there is technical and pro- 
fessional training; there is specialisation in science and 
industry; there is every possible application of life, to pur- 
poses and ends; but there is no life for its own sake. Let 
me illustrate. It is, I have read, a maxim of American 
business that "a man is damned who knows two things." 
"He is almost a dilettante," it was said of a student, "he 
reads Dante and Shakspere"! "The perfect professor," 
said a college president, "should be willing to work hard 
eleven months in the year." These are straws, if you like, 
but they show the way the wind blows. Again, you will 
find, if you travel long in America, that you are suffering 
from a kind of atrophy. You will not, at first, realise what 
it means. But suddenly it will flash upon you that you 
are suffering from lack of conversation. You do not con- 

[i94] 



CULTURE 

verse; you cannot; you can only talk. It is the rarest 
thing to meet a man who, when a subject is started, is 
willing or able to follow it out into its ramifications, to 
play with it, to embroider it with pathos or with wit, to 
penetrate to its roots, to trace its connections and affinities. 
Question and answer, anecdote and jest, are the staples of 
American conversation; and, above all, information. They 
have a hunger for positive facts. And you may hear them 
hour after hour rehearsing to one another their travels, 
their business transactions, their experiences in trains, in 
hotels, on steamers, till you begin to feel you have no 
alternatives before you but murder or suicide. An Ameri- 
can, broadly speaking, never detaches himself from ex- 
perience. His mind is embedded in it; it moves wedged 
in fact. His only escape is into humour; and even his 
humour is but a formula of exaggeration. It implies no 
imagination, no real envisaging of its object. It does not 
illuminate a subject, it extinguishes it, clamping upon 
every topic the same grotesque mould. That is why it 
does not really much amuse the English. For the English 
are accustomed to Shakspere, and to the London cabby. 

This may serve to indicate what I mean by lack of 
culture. I admit, of course, that neither are the English 
cultured. But they have culture among them. They do 
not, of course, value it; the Americans, for aught I know, 
value it more; but they produce it, and the Americans do 
not. I have visited many of their colleges and universities, 
and everywhere, except perhaps at Harvard — unless my 

[195] 



APPEARANCES 

impressions are very much at fault — I have found the 
same atmosphere. It is the atmosphere known as the 
" Yale spirit," and it is very like that of an English public 
school. It is virile, athletic, gregarious, all-penetrating, 
all-embracing. It turns out the whole university to sing 
rhythmic songs and shout rhythmic cries at football 
matches. It praises action and sniffs at speculation. It 
exalts morals and depresses intellect. It suspects the soli- 
tary person, the dreamer, the loafer, the poet, the prig. 
This atmosphere, of course, exists in English universities. 
It is imported there from the public schools. But it is 
not all-pervading. Individuals and cliques escape. And 
it is those who escape that acquire culture. In America, 
no one escapes, or they are too few to count. I know 
Americans of culture, know and love them; but I feel them 
to be lost in the sea of philistinism. They cannot draw 
together, as in England, and leaven the lump. The lump 
is bigger, and they are fewer. All the more honour to 
them; and all the more loss to America. 

Whether, from all this, any conclusion is to be drawn 
about the proper policy to be pursued at our universities, 
is a question I will not here discuss. Culture, I think, is 
one of those precious things that are achieved by accident, 
and by accident may be destroyed. The things we do to 
maintain it might kill it; the things we do to kill it might 
preserve it. My Canadian friends may be quite wrong 
in their diagnosis of the causes that engender or destroy 
it. But they are right in their sense of its importance; 

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CULTURE 

and it will be an interesting result of imperial unity if we 
find, to our astonishment, that the Dominions beyond the 
seas rally round exactly those things in England which 
we expect them to declare effete. The Rhodes scholars go 
to Oxford, not to Birmingham or Liverpool. And it is 
Cambridge that peoples the universities of the Empire with 
professors. 



1 197] 



XI 

ANT^US 

I saw to-day some really remarkable landscapes by an 
American artist. So, at least, they seem to me. They 
have, at any rate, a quality of imagination which one does 
not expect to find in this country. " One does not expect " 
— why not? Why, in this respect, is America, as un- 
doubtedly she is, so sterile? Artists must be born here 
as much as elsewhere. American civilisation, it is true, 
repels men of reflection and sensitiveness, just as it attracts 
men of action; so that, as far as immigration is concerned, 
there is probably a selection working against the artistic 
type. But, on the other hand, men of action often pro- 
duce sons with a genius for the arts; and it is to be supposed 
that they do so as much in America as elsewhere. It must 
be the environment that is unfavourable. Artists and 
poets belong to the genus I have named " Molly coddle"; 
and in America the Mollycoddle is hardly allowed to 
breathe. Nowhere on that continent, so far as I have been 
able to see, is there to be found a class or a clique of men, 
respected by others and respecting themselves, who also 
respect not merely art but the artistic calling. Broadly, 
business is the only respectable pursuit; including under 

[198] 



ANT.EUS 

business, Politics and Law, which in this country are only 
departments of business. Business holds the place in 
popular esteem that is held by arms in Germany, by letters 
in France, by Public Life in England. The man, therefore, 
whose bent is towards the arts, meets no encouragement; 
he meets everywhere the reverse. His father, his uncles, 
his brothers, his cousins, all are in business. Business is 
the only virile pursuit for people of education and means, 
who cannot well become chauffeurs. There is, no doubt, 
the professional career; but that, it is agreed, is adopted 
only by men of "no ambition." Americans believe in 
education, but they do not believe in educators. There 
is no money to be made in that profession, and the making 
of money is the test of character. The born poet or artist 
is thus handicapped to a point which may easily discourage 
him from running at all. At the best, he emigrates to 
Europe, and his achievement is credited to that continent. 
Or, remaining in America, he succumbs to the environment, 
puts aside his creative ambition, and enters business. It 
is not for nothing that Americans are the most active 
people in the world. They pay the penalty in an atrophy 
of the faculties of reflection and representation. 

Things are different in Europe, and even in England. 
There, not only are artists and men of letters honoured 
when they are successful — they are, of course, honoured 
at that stage in America; but the pursuit of literature and 
art is one which a young man need not feel it discreditable 
to adopt. The contemporaries of a brilliant youth at 

[i99] 



APPEARANCES 

Oxford or at Cambridge do not secretly despise him if he 
declines to enter business. The first-class man does not 
normally aspire to start life as a drummer. Public life 
and the Church offer honourable careers; and both of them 
have traditional affinities with literature. So has the Law, 
still in England a profession and not a trade. One may 
even be a don or a schoolmaster without serious discredit. 
Under these conditions a young man can escape from the 
stifling pressure of the business point of view. He can 
find societies like-minded with himself, equally indifferent 
to the ideal of success in business, equally inspired by in- 
tellectual or aesthetic ambitions. He can choose to be 
poor without feeling that he will therefore become des- 
picable. The attitude of the business classes in England, 
no doubt, is much the same as that of the business classes 
in America. But in England there are other classes and 
other traditions, havens of refuge from the prevalent com- 
mercialism. In America the trade-wind blows broad, 
steady, universal, over the length and breadth of the con- 
tinent. 

This, I believe, is one reason for the sterility of America 
in Art. But it is not the only one. Literature and Art 
in Europe rest on a long tradition which has not only 
produced books and pictures, but has left its mark on the 
language, the manners, the ideas, the architecture, the 
physical features of the country. The books and the 
pictures can be transplanted, but the rest cannot. Thus, 
even though in every art the technical tradition has been 

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interrupted, there remains in Europe what I will call the 
tradition of feeling; and it is this that is absent in America. 
Art in Europe is rooted; and there still persists into the 
present something of the spirit which fostered it in the 
past. Not only is Nature beautiful, she is humanised by 
the works of Man. Politics are mellowed by history, 
business tempered by culture. Classes are more segregated, 
types more distinct, ideals and aims more varied. The 
ghost of a spiritual life still hovers over the natural, shadow- 
ing it with the beat of solemn wings. There are finer 
overtones for a sensitive ear to catch; rainbow hues where 
the spray of life goes up. All this, it is true, is disappear- 
ing in Europe; but in America it has never existed. A 
sensitive European, travelling there, feels at once starved 
and flayed. Nothing nourishes, and everything hurts. 
There is natural beauty, but it has not been crowned and 
perfected by the hand of man. Whatever he has touched 
he has touched only to defile. There is one pursuit, com- 
merce; one type, the business man; one ideal, that of in- 
creasing wealth. Monotony of talk, monotony of ideas, 
monotony of aim, monotony of outlook on the world. 
America is industrialism pure and simple; Europe is in- 
dustrialism superimposed on feudalsim; and, for the arts, 
the difference is vital. 

But the difference is disappearing. Not that America 
is becoming like Europe, but Europe is becoming like 
America. This is not a case of the imitation that is a 
form of flattery; it is a case of similar causes producing 

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similar results. The disease — or shall we say, to use a 
neutral term — the diathesis of commercialism found in 
America an open field and swept through it like a fire. 
In Europe, its course was hampered by the structures of 
an earlier civilisation. But it is spreading none the less 
surely. And the question arises — In the future, when 
the European environment is as unfavourable to Art as 
the American, will there be, in the West, any Art at all? 
I do not know; no one knows; but there is this to remark: 
What I am calling commercialism is the infancy, not the 
maturity, of a civilisation. The revolution in morals, in 
manners, and in political and social institutions which 
must accompany the revolution in industry, has hardly yet 
begun its course. It has gone further in Europe than in 
America; so that, oddly enough, Europe is at once behind 
and in front of this continent, overlaps it, so to speak, at 
both ends. But it has not gone very far even in Europe; 
and for generations, I conceive, political and social issues 
will draw away much of the creative talent that might 
have been available for Art. In the end, one may suppose, 
something like a stable order will arise; an order, that is, 
in which people will feel that their institutions correspond 
sufficiently with their inner life, and will be able to devote 
themselves with a free mind to reflecting their civilisation 
in Art. 

But will their civilisation be of a kind to invite such re- 
flection? It will be, if the present movement is not alto- 
gether abortive, a civilisation of security, equity, and 

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peace; where there is no indigence, no war, and compara- 
tively little disease. Such society, certainly, will not offer 
a field for much of the kind of Art that has been or is now 
being produced. The primitive folk-song, the epic of war, 
the novel or play inspired by social strife, will have passed 
irrecoverably away. And more than that, it is sometimes 
urged, there will be such a dearth of those tense moments 
which alone engender the artistic mood, that Art of any 
kind will have become impossible. If that were true, it 
would not, in my opinion, condemn the society. Art is 
important, but there are things more important; and 
among those things are justice and peace. I do not, how- 
ever, accept the view that a peaceable and just society 
would necessarily also be one that is uninspired. That 
view seems to me to proceed from our incurable material- 
ism. We think there is no conflict except with arms; no 
rivalry except for bread; no aspiration except for money 
and rank. It is my own belief that the removal of the 
causes of the material strife in which most men are now 
plunged would liberate the energies for spiritual conflict; 
that the passion to know, the passion to feel, the passion 
to love, would begin at last to take their proper place in 
human life; and would engender the forms of Art appropri- 
ate to their expression. 

To return to America, what I am driving at is this: 
America may have an Art, and a great Art, but it will 
be after she has had her social revolution. Her Art has 
first to touch ground; and before it can do that, the ground 

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must be fit for it to touch. It was not till the tenth cen- 
tury that the seed of Mediaeval Art could be sown; it was 
not till the thirteenth that the flower bloomed. So now, 
our civilisation is not ripe for its own Art. What America 
imports from Europe is useless to her. It is torn from 
its roots ; and it is idle to replant it ; it will not grow. There 
must be a native growth, not so much of America, as of 
the modern era. That growth America, like Europe, must 
will. She has her prophet of it, Walt Whitman. In the 
coming centuries it is her work to make his vision real. 



I 204] 



CONCLUDING ESSAY 

The preceding pages were written in the course of travel 
and convey the impressions and reflections of the moment. 
Whatever interest they may have depends upon this im- 
mediacy, and for that reason I have reprinted them sub- 
stantially as they first appeared. Perhaps, however, some 
concluding reflections of a more considered nature may be 
of some interest to my readers. I do not advance them 
in a dogmatic spirit nor as final judgments, but as the first 
tentative results of my gropings into a large and compli- 
cated subject. I will ask the reader, therefore, be he Wes- 
tern or Oriental, to follow me in a spirit at once critical 
and sympathetic, challenging my suggestions as much as 
he will, but rather as a fellow-seeker than as an opponent 
bent upon refutation. For I am trying to comprehend 
rather than to judge, and to comprehend as impartially as 
is compatible with having an attitude of one's own at all. 
Ever since Mr. Rudyard Kipling wrote a famous line 
it has become a commonplace of popular thought in Eng- 
land and America that there is an East and a West, and 
an impassable gulf between them. But Mr. Kipling was 
thinking of India, and India is not all the East: he was 
thinking of England, and England is not all the West. 

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As soon as one approaches the question more particularly 
it becomes a complicated matter to decide whether there 
is really an East and a West, and what either stands for. 
That there is a West, in a real sense, with a unity of its 
own, is, I think, true. But it must be limited in time to 
the last two centuries, and in space to the countries of 
Western Europe and the continent of America. So un- 
derstood, the West forms, in all the most important re- 
spects, a homogeneous system. True, it is divided into 
different nations, speaking different languages, and pursu- 
ing different, and. of ten conflicting, policies; and these dis- 
tinctions are still so important that they colour our fears 
and hopes and sympathies, and take form in the burden 
of armaments and the menace of war. Nevertheless, seen 
in the perspective of history, they are survivals, atrophy- 
ing and disappearing. Behind and despite of them there 
is a common Western mind and a common Western organi- 
sation. Finance is cosmopolitan; industry is cosmopolitan; 
trade is cosmopolitan. There is one scientific method, 
and the results achieved by it are common. There is one 
system of industry, that known as Capitalism; and the 
problems arising from it and the solutions propounded 
appear alike in every nation. There is one political ten- 
dency, or fact — that of popular government. There are 
cognate aims and similar achievements in literature and 
art. There is, in brief, a Western movement, a Western 
problem, a Western mentality; and the particular hap- 
penings of particular nations are all parts of this one hap- 

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CONCLUDING ESSAY 

pening. Nor is this all. There is in the West a common 
religion. I do not refer to Christianity, for the religion I 
mean is held by hundreds and thousands who are not 
Christians, and indeed does not very readily find in Chris- 
tianity an expression at once coherent and pure. It has 
not been formulated in a creed; but it is to be felt and heard 
in all the serious work and all the serious thought of the 
West. It is the religion of Good and Evil, of Time and 
the process in Time. If it tried to draw up a confession 
of faith perhaps it would produce, as its first attempt, 
something of this kind: 

"I believe in the ultimate distinction between Good and 
Evil, and in a real process in a real Time. I believe it 
to be my duty to increase Good and diminish Evil; I be- 
lieve that in doing this I am serving the purpose of the 
world. I know this; I do not know anything else; and 
I am reluctant to put questions to which I have no answer, 
and to which I do not believe that anyone has an answer. 
Action, as defined above, is my creed. Speculation 
weakens action. I do not wish to speculate, I wish to live. 
And I believe the true life to be the life I have described.' ' 

In saying that this is the real creed of the modern Wes- 
tern man I do not pretend that he always knows or would 
admit it to be so. But if his actions, his words, and his 
thoughts be sympathetically interpreted, where all are at 
their best, I think they will be found to imply something 
of this kind. And this attitude I call religious, not merely 

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ethical, because of its conviction that the impulse towards 
Good is of the essence of the World, not only of men, or 
of Man. To believe this is an act of faith, not of reason; 
though it is not contrary to reason, as no faith should be 
or long can be. Many men do not believe it, for many are 
not religious; others, while believing it, may believe also 
many other things. But it is the irreducible minimum of 
religion in the modern West, the justification of our life, 
the faith of our works. I call it the Religion of Time, and 
distinguish it thus from the Religion of Eternity. 

In this sense, then, this profound sense, of a common 
aim and a common motive, there is really a West. Is 
there also an East? That is not so clear. In some im- 
portant respects, no doubt, the Eastern civilisations are 
alike. They are still predominantly agricultural. Their 
industry is manual, not mechanical. Their social unit is 
the extended family. To travel in the East is to realise 
that life on the soil and in the village is there still, the nor- 
mal life, as it has been almost everywhere and always, 
throughout civilisation, until the last century in the West. 
But though there is thus in the East a common way of 
life, there is not a common organisation nor a common 
spirit. Economically, the great Eastern countries are still 
independent of one another. Each lives for the most part 
by and on itself, and their intellectual and spiritual 
intercourse is now (though it was not in the past) as negli- 
gible as their economic commerce. The influence that is 
beginning to be strong upon them all is that of Western 

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CONCLUDING ESSAY 

culture; and if they become alike in their outlook on life, 
it will be by assimilating that. But, at present, they are 
not alike. It is easy, in this matter, to be deceived by 
the outward forms of religion. Because Buddhism origi- 
nated in India and spread to China and Japan, because 
Japan took Confucian ideals from China, it is natural to 
conclude that there is a common religious spirit through- 
out the East, or the Far East. But one might as reason- 
ably infer that the spirit of the christianised Teutons was 
the same as that of the Jews or of the Christians in the 
East. Nations borrow religions, but they shape them ac- 
cording to their own genius. And if I am not very much 
mistaken the outlook of India is, and always has been, 
radically distinct from and even opposed to that of China 
or Japan. These latter countries, indeed, I believe, are far 
closer to the West than they are to India. Let me explain. 
India is the true origin and home of what I have called 
the religion of Eternity. That idea seems to have gone 
out from her to the rest of the world. But nowhere else 
was it received with equal purity and passion. Elsewhere 
than in India the claims of Time were predominant. In 
India they have been subordinate. This, no doubt, is a 
matter of emphasis. No society, as a whole, could believe 
and act upon the belief that activity in Time is simply 
waste of time, and absorption in the Eternal the direct 
and immediate object of life. Such a view, acted upon, 
would bring the society quickly to an end. It would mean 
that the very physical instinct to live was extinguished. 

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But as the Eternal was first conceived by the amazing 
originality of India, so the passion to realise it here and 
now has been the motive of her saints from the date of the 
Upanishads to the twentieth century. And the method 
of realisation proposed and attempted has not been the 
living of the temporal life in a particular spirit, it has been 
the transcending of it by a special experience. Indian 
saints have always believed that by meditation and ascetic 
discipline, by abstaining from active life and all its claims, 
and cultivating solitude and mortification, they could reach, 
by a direct experience, union with the Infinite. This is as 
true of the latest as of the earliest saints, if and so far as 
Western influences have been excluded. Let me illustrate 
from the words of Sri Ramakrishna, one of the most typical 
of Indian saints, who died late in the nineteenth century. 
First, for the claim to pass directly into union with the 
Eternal: 

"I do see that Being as a Reality before my very eyes! 
Why then should I reason? I do actually see that it is 
the Absolute Who has become all these things about us; 
it is He who appears as the finite soul and the phenomenal 
world. One must have such an awakening of the Spirit 
within to see this Reality. . . . Spiritual awakening 
must be followed by Samadhi. In this state one forgets 
that one has a body; one loses all attachment to things of 
this world." 1 

x Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, second edition, Part L, p. 310. 

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CONCLUDING ESSAY 

And let it not be supposed that this state called Samadhi 
is merely one of intense meditation. It is something much 
more abnormal, or super-normal, than this. The book 
from which I am quoting contains many accounts of its 
effects upon Sri Ramakrishna. Here is one of them: 

"He is now in a state of Samadhi, the super-conscious 
or God-conscious state. The body is again motionless. 
The eyes are again fixed! The boys only a moment ago 
were laughing and making merry! Now they all look 
grave. Their eyes are steadfastly fixed on the master's 
face. They marvel at the wonderful change that has come 
over him. It takes him long to come back to the sense 
world. His limbs now begin to lose their stiffness. His 
face beams with smiles, the organs of sense begin to come 
back each to its own work. Tears of joy stand at the 
corners of his eyes. He chants the sacred name of 
Rama." 1 

The object, then, of this saint, and one he claims to 
have attained, is to come into union with the Infinite by a 
process which removes him altogether from contact with 
this world and from all possibility of action in it. This 
world, in fact, is to him, as to all Indian saints and most 
Indian philosophers, phenomenal and unreal. Of the spec- 
ulative problems raised by this conception I need not 
speak here. But it belongs to my purpose to bring out its 
bearing upon conduct. All conduct depends upon the con- 

1 Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, second edition, Part I. 

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ception of Good and Evil. Anti-moralists, like Nietzsche, 
assume and require these ideas, just as much as moralists; 
they merely attempt to give them a new content. If con- 
duct is to have any meaning, Good and Evil must be real 
in a real world. If they are held to be appearances con- 
duct becomes absurd. What now is Sri Ramakrishna's 
view of this matter? The whole life that we Western men 
call real is to him a mere game played by and for the sake 
of God, or, to use his phrase, of the Divine Mother. For 
her pleasure she keeps men bound to Time, instead of free 
in Eternity. For her pleasure, therefore, she creates and 
maintains Evil. I quote the passage: 

"My Divine Mother is always in Her sportive mood. 
The world, indeed, is Her toy. She will have Her own 
way. It is Her pleasure to take out of the prison-house 
and set free only one or two among a hundred thousand 
of her children! 

"A Brahmo: Sir, She can if She pleases set everybody 
free. Why is it, then, that She has bound us hand and 
foot with the chains of the world? 

"Sri Ramakrishna: Well, I suppose it is her pleasure. 
It is her pleasure to go on with Her sport with all these 
beings that She has brought into existence. The player 
amongst the children that touches the person of the Grand- 
dame, the same need no longer run about. He cannot 
take any further part in the exciting play of Hide and 
Seek that goes on. 

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CONCLUDING ESSAY 

"The others who have not touched the goal must run 
about and play to the great delight of the Grand-dame." 1 

Thus the Indian saint. Let us now try to bring his con- 
ception into relation with what we in the West believe 
to be real experience. In a railway accident a driver is 
pinned against the furnace and slowly burned to death, 
praying the bystanders in vain to put him out of his misery. 
What is this? It is the sport of God! In Putumayo in- 
nocent natives are deprived of their land, enslaved, tor- 
tured, and murdered, that shareholders in Europe may 
receive high dividends. What is this? The sport of God! 
In the richest countries of the West a great proportion of 
those who produce the wealth receive less than the wages 
which would suffice to keep them in bare physical health. 
What is this? Once more the sport of God! One might 
multiply examples, but it would be idle. No Western 
man could for a moment entertain the view of Sri Rama- 
krishna. To him such a God would be a mere devil. The 
Indian position, no doubt, is a form of idealism; but an 
idealism conditioned by defective experience of the life in 
Time. The saint has chosen another experience. But 
clearly he has not transcended ours, he has simply left it 
out. 

Now I am aware that it will be urged by some of the 
most sincere representatives of religion in India that Sri 
Ramakrishna does not typify the Indian attitude. Per- 
haps not, if we take contemporary India. But then con- 

i Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, second edition, Part I., p. 145. 

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temporary India has been profoundly influenced by Wes- 
tern thought; modern Indians like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, 
Keshub Chunder Sen, Rabindranath Tagore, could hardly 
have thought and felt as they did, and do, were it not for 
this influence. The following poem of Rabindranath Ta- 
gore may aptly symbolise this breaking in of the West 
upon the East, though I do not know that that was the 
author's intention: 

"With days of hard travail I raised a temple. It had no doors or 
windows, its walls were thickly built with massive stones. 

I forgot all else, I shunned all the world, I gazed in rapt contempla- 
tion at the image I had set upon the altar. 

It was always night inside, and lit by the lamps of perfumed oil. 
The ceaseless smoke of incense wound my heart in its heavy 
coils. 

Sleepless, I carved on the walls fantastic figures in mazy, bewilder- 
ing lines — winged horses, flowers with human faces, women 
with limbs like serpents. 

No passage was left anywhere through which could enter the song 
of birds, the murmur of leaves, or the hum of the busy village. 

The only sound that echoed in its dark dome was that of incanta- 
tions which I chanted. 

My mind became keen and still like a pointed flame, my senses 
swooned in ecstasy. 

I knew not how time passed till the thunderstone had struck the 
temple, and a pain stung me through the heart. 

The lamp looked pale and ashamed; the carvings on the walls, like 
chained dreams, stared meaningless in the light, as they 
would fain hide themselves. 

I looked at the image on the altar. I saw it smiling and alive with 
the living touch of God. The night I had imprisoned spread 
its wings and vanished." l 
1 The Gardener, p. 125. 

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CONCLUDING ESSAY 

The closed temple, I believe, is a true image of the 
spiritual life of India, if not at all times, at any rate for 
many centuries previous to the advent of the English. 
Everything seems to point to this — the symbolic charac- 
ter of Indian art; the absence of history and the prevalence 
of religious legend; the cult of the fakir and the wander- 
ing ascetic. In India one feels religion as one feels it 
nowhere else, unless it were in Russia. But the religion 
one feels is peculiar. It is the religion that denies the 
value of experience in Time. It is the religion of the 
Eternal. 

But, it will be urged, how can that be, when India con- 
tinues to produce her teeming millions; when these per- 
force live their brief lives in a constant and often vain 
struggle for a bare livelihood; when, in order to live at all, 
it is necessary at every point to be straining vitality in the 
pursuit of temporal goods or the avoidance of temporal 
evils? 

I make no attempt to disguise or to weaken this paradox. 
But I suggest that it is but one of the many paradoxes 
set up by the conflict between men's instinct for life and 
their conscious beliefs. Indians live not because they be- 
lieve in life, but because they cannot help it. Their hold 
on life is certainly less than that of Western men. Thus I 
have been told by administrators of famine relief or of 
precautions against plague, that what they have to con- 
tend with is not so much the resistance as the indifference 
of the population. "Why worry us?" they say, in effect, 

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" life is not worth the trouble. Let us die and be rid of it.' 
Life is an evil, that is the root feeling of India; and the 
escape is either, for the mass, by death, or for the men of 
spiritual genius, by a flight to the Eternal. How this 
attitude has arisen I do not here seek to determine; race, 
climate, social and political conditions, all no doubt have 
played their part. The spiritual attitude is probably an 
effect, rather than a cause, of an enfeebled grip on life. 
But no one, I think, who knows India, would dispute 
that this attitude is a fact; and it is a fact that dis- 
tinguishes India not only from the West but from the Far 
East. 

For China and Japan, though they have had, and to 
a less extent still have, religion, are not, in the Indian sense, 
religious. The Chinese, in particular, strike one as secular 
and practical; quite as secular and practical as the English. 
They have had Buddhism, as we have had Christianity; 
but no one who can perceive and understand would say 
that their outlook is determined by Buddhism, any more 
than ours is by Christianity. It is Confucianism that 
expresses the Chinese attitude to life, whenever the Chinese 
soul, becoming aware of itself, looks out from the forest of 
animistic beliefs in which the mass of the people wander. 
And Confucianism is perhaps the best and purest expres- 
sion of the practical reason that has ever been formulated. 
Family duty, social duty, political duty, these are the 
things on which it lays stress. And when the Chinese 
spirit seeks escape from these primary preoccupations, it 

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CONCLUDING ESSAY 

finds its freedom in an art that is closer to the world of 
fact, imaginatively conceived, than that of any other race. 
Chinese art purifies itself from symbolism to become in- 
terpretation; whereas in India the ocean of symbolism 
never ceases to roll over the drowning surface of the phe- 
nomenal world. Chinese literature, again, has this same 
hold upon life. It is such as Romans or Englishmen, if 
equally gifted, might have written. Much of it, indeed, 
is stupidly and tediously didactic. But where it escapes 
into poetry it is a poetry like Wordsworth's, revealing the 
beauty of actual things, rather than weaving across them 
an embroidery of subjective emotions. The outlook of 
China is essentially the outlook of the West, only more 
sane, more reasonable, more leisured and dignified. Posi- 
tivism and Humanity, the dominant forms of thought 
and feeling in the West, have controlled Chinese civilisa- 
tion for centuries. The Chinese have built differently from 
ourselves and on a smaller scale, with less violence and 
less power; but they have built on the same founda- 
tions. 

And Japan, too, at bottom is secular. Her true religion 
is that of the Emperor and his divine ancestors. Her 
strongest passion is patriotism. A Japanese, like an In- 
dian, is always ready to die. But he dies for the splen- 
dours and glories of this world of sense. It is not because 
he has so little hold on life, but because he has so much, 
that he so readily throws it away. The Japanese are 
unlike the Chinese and unlike the Europeans and Ameri- 

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cans; but their outlook is similar. They believe in the 
world of time and change; and because of this attitude, 
they and the rest of the world stand together like a moun- 
tain in the sun, contemplating uneasily that other mys- 
terious peak, shrouded in mist, which is India. 

The reader by this time will have grasped the point I 
am trying to put. There are in Man two religious im- 
pulses, or, if the expression be preferred, two aspects of 
the religious impulse. I have called them the religion of 
the Eternal and the religion of Time; and India, I suggest, 
stands pre-eminently for the one, the West for the other, 
while the other countries of the East rank rather with the 
West than with India. It is not necessary to my purpose 
to exaggerate this antithesis. I will say if it be preferred, 
that in India the emphasis is on the Eternal, in the West 
on Time. But that much at least must be said and is 
plainly true. Now, as between these two attitudes, I find 
myself quite clearly and definitely on the side of the West. 
I have said in the preceding pages hard things about Wes- 
tern civilisation. I hate many of its manifestations, I 
am out of sympathy with many of its purposes. I can 
see no point, for instance, in the discovery of the north 
or the south pole, and very little in the invention of aero- 
planes; while gramophones, machine guns, advertisements, 
cinematographs, submarines, dreadnoughts, cosmopolitan 
hotels, seem to me merely fatuous or sheerly disastrous. 
But what lies behind all this, the tenacity, the courage, the 
spirit of adventure, this it is that is the great contribution 

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CONCLUDING ESSAY 

of the West. It is not the aeroplane that is valuable; 
probably it will never be anything but pernicious, for its 
main use is likely to be for war. But the fact that men so 
lightly risk their lives to perfect it, that is valuable. The 
West is adventurous; and, what is more, it is adventurous 
on a quest. For behind and beyond all its fatuities, con- 
fusions, crimes, lies, as the justification of it all, that deep 
determination to secure a society more just and more hu- 
mane which inspires all men and all movements that are 
worth considering at all, and, to those who can understand, 
gives greatness and significance even to some of our most 
reckless enterprises. We are living very " dangerously "; 
all the forces are loose, those of destruction as well as 
those of creation; but we are living towards something; we 
are living with the religion of Time. 

So far, I daresay, most Western men will agree with me 
in the main. But they may say, some of them, as the 
Indian will certainly say, " Is that all? Have you no place 
for the Eternal and the Infinite?" To this I must reply 
that I think it clear and indisputable that the religion of 
the Eternal, as interpreted by Sri Ramakrishna, is alto- 
gether incompatible with the religion of Time. And the 
position of Sri Ramakrishna, I have urged, is that of most 
Indian, and as I think, of most Western, mystics. Not, 
however, of all, and not of all modern mystics, even in 
India. Rabindranath Tagore, for example, in his "Sad- 
hana," has put forward a mysticism which does, at least, 
endeavour to allow for and include what I have called the 

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religion of Time. To him, and to other mystics of real 
experience, I must leave the attempt to reconcile Eternity 
and Time. For my own part, I can only approach the 
question from the point of view of Time, and endeavour to 
discover and realise the most that can be truly said by 
one who starts with the belief that that is real. The pro- 
foundest prophets of the religion of Time are, in my judg- 
ment, Goethe and George Meredith; and from them, and 
from others, and from my own small experience, I seem to 
have learned this: the importance of that process in Time 
in whose reality we believe does not lie merely in the better- 
ing of the material and social environment, though we 
hold the importance of that to be great; it lies in the devel- 
opment of souls. And that development consists in a con- 
stant expansion of interest away from and beyond one's 
own immediate interests out into the activities of the world 
at large. Such expansion may be pursued in practical life, 
in art, in science, in contemplation, so long as the contem- 
plation is of the real processes of the real world in time. 
To that expansion I see no limit except death. And I 
do not know what comes after death. But I am clear 
that whatever comes after, the command of Life is the 
same — to expand out of one's self into the life of the world. 
This command — I should rather say this impulse — seems 
to me absolute, the one certain thing on which everything 
else must build. I think it enough for religion, in the 
case at least of those who have got beyond the infant 
need for certitudes and dogmas. These, perhaps, are few; 

[220] 



CONCLUDING ESSAY 

yet they may be really more numerous than appears. And 
on the increase in their numbers, and the intensity of their 
conviction and their life, the fate of the world seems to me 
to depend. 



THE END 



[22l] 




THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS 
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